According to SlangLang.net[i], the quote in the title was inaccurately attributed to musician Randy Jackson, a judge on the television show American Idol, presumably condensing the reasoning behind his eminent “no” vote for a contestant. In some ways American Idol was similar to the late 1970’s variety show The Gong Show, where members of the three-judge panel could interrupt the contestant in the middle of their performance by taking a mallet and striking a large gong. I’ve never watched an episode of American Idol, but I have seen scenes from other shows in its genre, such as America’s Got Talent, and I have to admit that seeing people with varying levels of talent performing in front of a team of judges (usually four of them) for a chance to advance towards additional performances and some ultimate prize reminded me of the corporate board room setting, where the director of a new Project Management Office (PMO) would be making a pitch for the other executives to, essentially, manage their work differently. One or two enlightened members of the organization’s upper management have somehow procured the resources to set up a PMO, and its leader must now convince the other high-level decision-makers of its utility. And the responses from those judges executives are often the same as this blog’s title, only expressed in management-ese. When I say these rejections come couched in management-ese, I’m referring to statements such as:
- “Our work is mostly level-of-effort, so any cost or schedule performance measurement system won’t apply.”
- “We can’t create a baseline, because the nature of the work is constantly changing.”
- “We don’t want a ‘full-up’ Earned Value Management System. They’re too difficult and expensive.”
- “Our customer doesn’t require those PM-based schedules or baselines, so why should we?”
- “If you’re going to do PM right, you’ll need to have Scope, Cost, and Schedule baselines, with actual costs being collected at the appropriate level of the Work Breakdown Structure, plus a full-up risk register (no initial caps) and formal Project Review meetings, and we just don’t have the time for all that.”
Of course, none of these objections are valid, as anyone with a gram of managerial acuity can readily attest. But, somehow, they seem to carry the anti-PM narrative forward, planting the seeds of eventual PMO failure. In a way, it would be better if these pseudo-executives would just grab a large mallet, and strike an outsized conference room-placed gong. That way the talent that the PMO director had assembled could just go ahead and find better gigs, rather than waste all the time trying to steer the organization’s business model towards something more rational.
It must be pointed out, though, that, if we PM-types were to be brutally honest with ourselves, much of the resistance towards advancing a Project Management capability within the macro-organization resides with us. Supreme confidence in the efficacy of the PMBOK Guide®, coupled with a dismissive attitude towards all who don’t recognize its utility, almost always produces an implementation strategy that simply doesn’t work. Generations of business school graduates who have been inculcated in the idea that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth,” or that the only true source of cost information is the general ledger, will rarely accept the new PM-oriented business model paradigms at face value. Nor will these be influenced by the threat of PMP®s tut-tutting resistance to the idea that they must now hire on multiple schedulers or cost performance system professionals. The notion that an organization’s PM capability can be advanced via eat-your-peas-style hectoring is both nonsensical and widespread, much like the reflexive resistance to it among the poorly-educated managerial class.
Adding to this level of inherent opposition from our end of the PM spectrum are those who insist that only robust (meaning, implemented and maintained the way they think it should be done) cost and schedule control systems can ever be considered acceptable, or even tolerable. The truth is that rather simple Earned Value Management Systems can produce powerful information streams, but many self-proclaimed experts relentlessly push for resource-loaded schedules, highly-detailed Work Packages, and few activities employing the milestone estimate method for collecting percent complete data as a bare minimum for all such systems. This, of course, has the effect of making EVMSs more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to set up and maintain, while feeding into the inaccurate (and unfair) accusation that all EVMSs are difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to set up and maintain. In a very real sense, those who assume the intellectual high ground simply because they are PM-types, combined with those pushing for only thoroughly robust system implementation, are doing the rest of the PM world a huge disservice.
No wonder all of those outsized gongs are being installed in corporate board rooms.
[i] Retrieved from https://www.slanglang.net/memes/thats-gonna-be-a-no-from-me-dawg/ on February 21, 2022, 10:56 MST.
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