Why You Should Tie Cans To Your PM’s Car Bumper

 

It’s a pretty amazing coincidence that the September theme for ProjectManagement.com is Personal PM, seeing as my son is getting married later this month. Given that the typical wedding service lasts between twenty minutes and one hour, such occasions may be, on a minute-by-minute basis, the most thoroughly planned and scheduled events in the universe. Smallbusiness.chron.com asserts that Critical Path Method (CPM) scheduling began in ancient times, and cites the pyramids (2589 BC) as evidence,[i] but marriages may pre-date the pyramids by thousands of years, making them, in my opinion, the most likely driver for the invention/discovery of CPM. This provides quite the perspective flip, no? In the 21^st Century, the preeminent organization for advancing Project Management, PMI®, assigns as a monthly theme for its writers the notion of “personal” PM, when it may very well be that PM originated and was personal all along, and only moved to industry and management science later. But this perspective points to something that I think we’ve known all along, but only rarely articulated: Project Management has that scarce and unique attribute of being completely scalable.

To be sure, not all of the management concepts that seek to belong to the PM club are scalable. Consider risk management (no initial caps). Those techniques might aid in making decisions in a gambling establishment, but most table games in, say, Las Vegas have very specific, inviolable rules, and are conducted in a highly controlled environment. Given the number of cards in a deck, or number of faces on dice, or number of slots on a roulette wheel, Gaussian Curve-based analysis can provide for some better-informed decisions. Business, in general, and Project Management in particular have very few very specific rules, and never takes place in a highly controlled environment. Dealing with chaos is part and parcel of the PM function, and chaotic events are, definitionally, impossible to quantify with respect to their impact(s) or odds of occurrence. So, risk management (no initial caps) utterly fails the scalability test.

What of this blog’s titular analysis technique, Game Theory? Well, this is more of a mixed bag, and mostly depends on the game being analyzed, along with its strength of analogy to the management problem being addressed. John Nash won a Nobel Prize in economics for his contributions to Game Theory and management sciences, but Game Theory itself also suffers from a limited capacity for scalability, with perhaps the best example being the Ultimatum Game. This game entails approaching two people (Person A and Person B) and making them the following offer: the Experimenter will give them $100 (USD) if Person A can produce a scheme for how the money will be split between them, and this plan is accepted by Person B as proposed the first time. If Person B rejects Person A’s plan to split the money, neither participant receives anything. Conventional Game Theory wisdom held that Person A would maximize their payoff by proposing that Person A receives $99, while Person B receives only $1, on the notion that Person B would essentially be presented with a choice to receive either $1 or nothing at all, and could be reliably projected to choose the former. In actuality, this proposed split was almost never accepted, usually because Person B didn’t believe that such a proposal was “fair.” In certain cultures, even a 50/50 split was routinely rejected, for what the researchers called “cultural” reasons. But another way of saying “the experiment didn’t work out as our theories predicted due to cultural reasons” would be “our analysis failed to take into account a sufficient number of parameters – much less accurately quantifying them – to generate a reliable predictor of the subjects’ decisions.” In short, the difficulty in recognizing and quantifying the necessary number of parameters to reliably invoke Game Theory in business applications serves as an upper limit on its scalability.

Compare this limited scalability to Earned Value and Critical Path Methodologies (EVM and CPM, respectively).  To get a pretty accurate idea of how much a certain effort, large or small, will cost at its conclusion, simply assess how much has been spent by the time the 50% complete point has been reached, and double it. By extension, dividing the percent complete figure into cumulative actual costs generates a fairly reliable Estimate at Completion. Interestingly, this formula also works for schedules (though it’s not, technically, CPM). To get a usable estimate of how long a specific piece of Scope will take to complete, again, large or small, divide the percent complete figure into its cumulative duration. As for CPM-specific applications, all successful projects had to be directed by a person or persons who knew which activities needed to be completed before others could start, well before anybody thought to coin the phrase “schedule logic.”

To sum up, the essential analysis techniques of PM, Earned Value and Critical Path, are completely scalable, from modern mega-projects, to ancient mega-projects, all the way down to arranging a wedding. Indeed, I think we should petition to include a chapter on bouquet-throwing in the next edition of the PMBOK Guide®!

[i] Retrieved from https://smallbusiness.chron.com/history-critical-path-method-55917.html on September 3, 2022, 19:45 MDT.