Dream Interpretations, PM Nightmare Edition

 

As I’m sure most (if not all) of my regular readers know, many psychologists believe that, when we dream, we are experiencing our subconscious selves attempting to communicate with our conscious selves, but in a visual language which is difficult to understand in our waking existence. The images can be primordial, powerful in connotation, but irrational in delivery. And, when we experience recurring dreams – or, painfully enough, recurring nightmares – there’s a natural tendency to try to unravel the message and, potentially, act on it.

So, what are the most common project management nightmares? Well, clearly, there’s the over-budget, late-schedule, but not knowing about it until it’s too late one. Then there’s the customer-pushing-extra-scope variety, leading to the most common project performance killer, the dreaded scope creep. There are many others, and yet I must ask: what are these nightmares trying to tell us?

Consider our information streams. They are the real-world data feeds, what we see on the surface, and the information that leads us to act, to make decisions. As managers, the information we seek is analogous to what we see, hear, smell, and touch in our waking existences. When we seek irrelevant information, and get it, and then make decisions based on it, then the nightmares start to become realities. Why? Because there’s a project management reality out there, that’s not being perceived, and threatens to become an inescapable outcome … and management is oblivious to the imminent disaster looming. The information streams an organization chooses is a clear indicator of its true character, as well as its chances for success.

Take the organization that eschews earned value analysis. This is most often the case where our friends, the accountants, have successfully pushed the fraudulent idea that the general ledger can provide all relevant cost information to decision makers. But there are many instances where the organization elects to nix any EV system because they simply do not want to know how their projects are performing in cost performance space. Why would any organization not  want to know this? Because it’s directly tied to responsibility. Organizations that seek to obscure who or what was responsible for successes or failures, and, instead, substitute narratives bereft of facts, cannot abide even the most basic of earned value management systems. Organizations seeking to deflect responsibility will resist information streams that accurately reflect cost and schedule performance, and will repeatedly encounter the way-over-cost, way-past-schedule nightmare.

Risk management is another conceit, that the real world of project performance will attempt to penetrate with frightening feedback. Bad things happen on projects – it’s a fact of management life. How the project team responds is the difference between success and failure. So, what if a risk analyst predicted that a given bad thing might hit the project? Did it alter the team’s response at all? If yes, then, yeah, it was a good idea to spend that money on the risk analyst. However, in my experience, the risk people rarely – if ever – proscribe a course of action that wasn’t already on the project team’s roster. In other words, they accurately worried for you, Mr. /Ms. PM. And it bought you exactly nothing. The anti-PM nightmare talisman that you bought from the risk management types is literally worthless.  Sorry.

And what about those who attempt to “manage” their schedule via milestone lists? These invariably list project objectives (again, don’t tell me, right? In a spreadsheet?), and pull “status” by asking their principals if they anticipate that they will accomplish their milestones on-time, a little late, or very late/miss altogether. The answer is, invariably, that they will certainly meet their schedule dates … until they don’t. This is also reflective of an organization that has no intention of respecting responsibility for project performance and is, instead, situating itself for convenient scapegoating.

Are these a few of your PM recurring nightmares? The interpretation lies within identifying the business model pathologies that have wormed their way into your organization. And that exercise, dear readers, is never without pain.