Virtual Non-Project Management

 

As my projectmanagement.com co-bloggers and columnists explore the realm of virtual project management, I (naturally) thought I’d take the opposite tack. Whereas last week’s piece reviewed those instances where people engaged in pursuing a given accomplishment will almost automatically engage in real-life project management techniques, like earned value and critical path analysis, there is another side to that coin: people who claim to be engaged in legitimate project management techniques, but are not.

Chief among these pretenders are the asset managers, e.g. accountants and financial analysts. Indeed, one of the fastest and most automatic ways of readily identifying the pros from the schmoes has to do with the return-on-investment (ROI) analysis. The ROI analysis is a tool that has utility exclusively in the asset management realm (and, frankly, not nearly as valuable in that arena as it has been cranked up to be), and any attempt to bring it into the arena of project management is a dead give-away. How do I know this? Well, a couple of mind exercises will make this assertion plain.

The ultimate goal of the asset manager is to maximize shareholder wealth. The ultimate goal of the project manager is to complete the project to the customers’ satisfaction, within the stated constraints of cost and schedule. A generic analyst announces that she has made available the information on whether or not a piece of equipment being considered for purchase has a positive return with respect to its cost by the time its value has depreciated to zero. Which manager is interested in this information?

Next, a PM is reviewing the schedule status on a Design Engineering task, which just happens to be on his schedule network’s critical path. The designer’s organization is well under budget, but may be late in delivering the drawings and specifications, meaning that the whole project may come in late. The same generic analyst (although by now we can pretty much guess what this analyst’s background is) wants time to discuss the cost of the office equipment the designer’s organization is incurring. Does the PM care about this piece of management data in the least?

Next on my hit-list are the risk managers. As I’ve stated often, in a project’s earliest stages, where contingency budgets and what-if analyses are being prepared, these people have a role to play. However, once the project is underway, their analyses are a waste of time. The basic acid test here is: in those instances where a so-called risk event actually comes to pass, did any part of the risk analysis change the response of the project team to the occurrence? If the answer is no, then any and all effort and resources that went into such an analysis was wasted. It’s really little more than institutional worrying, trapped out in mind-boggling statistical jargon to help create the illusion of management science sophistication. But it is big business, with organizations offering this type of expertise being very widespread, and all advancing under the rubric of being part and parcel of legitimate, advanced project management. Of course, the inconvenient aspect of reality, that the future cannot be quantified, even by Gaussian Curves, never enters into these organizations’ promotional literature, so they can be expected to continue to be very widespread.

Finally, much as the famous Job Jar in the comic strip Hi and Lois is not a schedule by any reach of the imagination, so, too, do all action item listings fail to come close to fulfilling the function of a project schedule. All valid schedules’ entries have the following characteristics:

·         Projected duration

·         Projected start date

·         A previous determination of whether or not the entry exists within the scope of the given project

·         Whether it ought to be done before, during, or after other entries in the network.

Otherwise, what you have is, essentially, a poll, a repository of data that has not been (or may not be able to be) processed into usable management information. In political contests, poll data can be rather valuable, but in a project management setting it’s next to worthless. If the PM has hard data that the Design Engineering task is in danger of coming in late, who cares about the opinions of the other  stakeholders of the performance of the design engineers? Isn’t that data irrelevant?

Naturally, should any asset, risk, or action item advocates take exception to any part of this blog, feel free to leave a comment. After all, I’ve been disagreed with before – and you’ve been wrong before (hat tip to one of my heroes, the late William F. Buckley for that closing line).