Real Business Intelligence, Fake Business Intelligence

 

This story appears in a beloved book I read as a child, Reader’s Digest Treasury for Young Readers:

Yet even Dr. Bell (the person after whom Arthur Conan Doyle modeled Sherlock Holmes) sometimes made mistakes. Luckily, he also had a sense of humor when people asked him to give examples of his skill as a detective, he liked to tell this story: One day he and his pupils were examining a patient in a hospital bed. “Aren’t you a musician?” Dr. Bell asked him.

“Aye,” admitted the sick man.

“You see, gentlemen, it is quite simple. This man has a disease of the cheek muscles, from too much blowing on wind instruments. We need only ask him, and he will admit it. What musical instrument do you play, my man?”

The man got up on his elbows. “The big drum, doctor!”

I like to remember this story whenever I explore the epistemology of management information streams, since it is so easy to equate perceived project success with factors that may have been entirely incidental to the remembered project’s actual success. I once was working to set up the cost and schedule performance systems on a major project that was headed by a manager who insisted that my team provide a report he termed a “swim lane chart.” What he actually wanted was a PERT chart, sorted by performing organization. I could see the utility – the various performing teams were in a column to the left, and the activity boxes that appeared to their right represented the scope for which they were responsible.

“Okay” I offered, “we can do it, but we’ll need to start with a Work Breakdown Structure. Then, we’ll need the Organizational Breakdown Structure, so that we can cross-reference them into a Responsibility/Accountability Matrix, or RAM. Once we have that, we can load the information into the critical path software, and generate your report.”

“I don’t want to do any of that stuff. I just want a swim lane chart.”

“I know you want the chart, but we can’t get there without the RAM.”

So he had me removed from the project.

This guy just knew that his so-called swim lane chart was the key to managing the project to a successful outcome, and wasn’t going to listen to any of that project controls nonsense about how to get there.

I’m sure my readers have many similar stories. Some manager or exec has a particular project management artifact that serves as their security blanket, and will brook no challenge to its efficacy. Their attachments to these talismans can reach a zeal rarely seen outside of religious institutions or sports bars. And, when these superfluous information streams become institutionalized, the amount of managerial folly they generate can become extraordinary. Just look at the number of U.S. Government agencies who insist that projects have a risk management system.

It doesn’t stop with the risk management crowd, either – they’re just the more irksome of the bunch. Virtually every attempt at quantitative analysis in business or management requires the use of some subjective variable, variables that really cannot be known to within the boundary triggers for making decisions. For example, in comparing the Return on Investment (ROI) among competing prospective projects, the anticipated rate of return can only rarely be estimated to within double-digit accuracies. However, the decision on which projects to pursue are almost always made by single-digit margins. It’s as if the organization is making a decision to select a subcontractor based on the estimation of who has the fewer Capricorns on staff, and attacks anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that as an appropriate basis for making the decision as hopelessly ignorant.

Of course, there are ways of objectively determining the validity (or lack thereof) of the competing management information streams, but how to do so would take an entire book, which, fortunately, I happened to write.