It’s not every week I get to use two different terms that need explaining in the title of this blog, but that’s what’s called for with this topic. “Moat dragon” is slang for a person of low-to-middling status within an organization who assumes some measure of the authority of the person they serve by acting as a sort of filter, or regulator for people who seek access to the organization’s decision-makers. Sixty years ago, this person may have been called a “secretary,” and basically controlled the executive’s calendar, as well as screening their incoming phone calls. At a certain level, answering the telephone and scheduling meetings and appointments for another person in a 1960’s-era office presents as fairly mundane work. From another angle, though, this function effectively controls, or highly influences, the information flow in and out of this executive’s office, a very powerful sway indeed. Communications have rightly been referred to as the life-blood of the organization, making this person analogous to that organization’s beating heart, or at least its carotid artery. Rather than prolong the anatomical metaphor, I’ll return to the feudal version, with the executive as the king of the castle, his knights as the Project Team, the moat as the exec’s outer office, and the filter/influencer impacting the communications in and out as the … well, you know.
Now, just because rotary telephones and pen-and-ink day planners are a thing of the past doesn’t mean that communications controllers/influencers aren’t having an outsized impact on those communications, and, by extension, decisions coming from the execs. I have written previously about an effect that I’ve referred to as “the black box syndrome.” This is where an organization has been sold on the idea that, if they were to buy this one particular software package, it can feed its decision-makers all of the information they need to successfully lead their Project Teams, or facilities, or portfolios, or … well, anything up to and including the whole enterprise. I find black box syndrome to be a particularly pernicious business model pathology for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the Management Information System (MIS) that enabled informed decision-making last year is, in all probability, making notable progress towards obsolescence in today’s competitive environment. The need for more timely, accurate, and relevant information never goes away. Recall the Information Technology (IT) axiom “begin with the end in mind.” For specific applications, this is undeniably true. But in the macro sense, the successful manager does not know what the essential information output that will be needed next year looks like.
From the Project Management Office (PMO) perspective, we already know what the proverbial 80% solution looks like. Even a simple Earned Value Management System, preferably derived from baselines generated from a Critical Path Methodology-based network, used by each and every part of the project portfolio provides invaluable insights into that portfolio’s cost and schedule performance. This information can be further distilled to predict at-completion costs and dates, indicate which types of work the organization performs best, which customers are more reliable or profitable, the types of market strategies that ought to be pursued, and which ought to be abandoned. Many PM-types can spend their careers pursuing this 80% solution, arrayed against our friends, the Asset Managers, as well some within our own camp (cough, risk managers, cough), and delivering an organization into a place where they can become significantly more competitive by embracing the tried-and-true. It can be very rewarding. However, when black box syndrome strikes an organization that’s pretty good at the basic PM stuff, the capacity of those oversold and underperforming software systems to begin to function as moat dragons becomes manifest.
For example, virtually every “enterprise” or “portfolio” management software will claim as its most significant payoff a measurable increase in efficiency. This is, of course, an Asset Management goal, with little appeal to we PM types. To engage in a bit of hyperbole, PMs flat do not care if the printer/copier/scanner they are using to produce a deliverable report was purchased, leased, or what kind of service contract came with it. We just want to know if we’re going to be able to deliver said report to the customer on-time, on-budget. Also, I have yet to encounter any of these enterprise or portfolio management information systems that takes into account the organization’s underlying strategy with respect to the Quality-Affordability-Availability, pick any two, structure. This is not a trivial oversight – the MIS that claims to deliver all the relevant information needed to attain success across a portfolio or enterprise that emphasizes certain points of view at the expense of others causes damage by influencing decisions in a particular, perhaps (probably) inappropriate direction.
In the 1960s, moat dragons could change the course of an organization by frustrating people, and, by extension, their ideas, from receiving a hearing before that organization’s executives. In the 2020s, this function (or malfunction) is potentially taken over by overhyped computer programs and companies susceptible to black box syndrome. So, yeah, feel free to upgrade your portfolio/enterprise Management Information Systems. Just take a peek inside that black box prior to plugging it in.
It might have a dragon inside.
