Recurring Project Nightmares

 

Probably most people who took a challenging course in college have the recurring dream of becoming suddenly aware of having signed up for a course that should have been attended, but wasn’t, and finals week is upon them. I’ve had this dream fairly often – at least four times per year since finishing my undergraduate work – so you would think that whatever message my subconscious was trying to tell me would have been transmitted by now. But, no, I guess my id is just having too much fun giving my superego fits.

But project disasters also recur, and, often, for very basic reasons. One of the most basic has to do with the development of the Work Breakdown Structure, or WBS. Anybody who knows the first thing about project management has to know what a WBS is, which makes it so abused. The novice executive simply can’t admit to not knowing how to develop one, so they will take a stab at it, even if they have no idea how it ought to be developed. They’ll put in organizational breakdown structure elements, or functional breakdown structure elements, and double-dog dare the project team to tell them nay.

What’s the consequence? Since OBS or FBS elements in the WBS cannot be objectively measured as to percent complete, they negate any attempts at capturing cost or schedule performance through either earned value or critical path methodologies. The core of these methodologies relies on the estimate of percent complete as of the end of a given reporting period. Quick! What’s your percent complete on the design team? On the reporting team? Can’t offer it up? It’s because there are non-scope-based elements in your WBS, so you are pretty much helpless when it comes to assessing cost and schedule performance. And, when you are flying blind in cost/schedule performance space, that’s the stuff of managerial nightmares.

Consider also the almost aristocratic trend away from “doing” the aforementioned earned value or critical path analysis. Oh, sure, our friends, the accountants, have convinced you that they can provide cost performance information, based on analysis derived from the general ledger. Such assertions are complete equine droppings, but, for whatever reason, seem to gain credibility in boardrooms. With the supine whisperings of the asset managers lulling project leaders into a false sense of security, projects leap into nightmare space, with chilling regularity. 

And what of the milestone watchers? They eschew actual activities, with schedule logic, in favor of putting project objectives – don’t tell me, let me guess: they’re in a spreadsheet, right? – into some report, where the milestones are assessed with one of three status colors:

·         Green, we’re gonna hit this on-time.

·         Yellow, not so confident.

·         Red, yeah, we’re gonna blow it.

Problem here is, everything is green, until it isn’t. Absolutely no ability to forewarn execs in time for them to correct what would have been easily fixable, had they just been notified in a timely manner.

Can risk managers fulfill the role of Sigmund Freud, and alleviate your project nightmares? Um, no, and for one simple reason: the future cannot be quantified. The RM-types can push all the statistical – what was my term before? Oh, yeah, equine droppings – they want, but they can’t eliminate the recurring PM nightmares.

What can provide relief to such nightmares? It’s simple – return to the basics.