On Why PMs Get Stymied (Part II)

 

Last week I discussed some of the tactics that the Anti-Project Management crowd employs, and this week I’d like to review their strategies and motivations. Why do they act that way? I mean, let our friends the accountants announce a new module in the general ledger, say, payroll, and nobody even notices, even if it means the timecard entry process has just become harder than changing the password to your wireless router. But let someone introduce an Earned Value Management System (EVMS), and certain people start to scream like scalded howler monkeys. What gives?

Let me start with a caveat – if you are doing PM wrong, either in the characteristics of the system or its implementation strategy, then your opponents are on the right side of this conflict, motives notwithstanding. And while there are, no doubt, many reasons that would come into play in the execution of this thwarting-of-PM business, I believe there are three main drivers behind the PMO’s opponents. Here they are, in reverse order of severity.

3. A bad experience stemming from a previous forced PM implementation. Since the late 1960s, various United States Government entities that rely on multiple contractors to supply goods and services have had several levels of requirements for the implementation of PM techniques, specifically Earned Value- and Critical Path-based systems. In their most vigorous phases, a team of auditors would evaluate the target contractor and issue findings on deviations from the guidance, needing time and energy to correct. Forced PM implementations tend to be difficult and expensive, and those involved will often come away with a negative impression of PM in general.

2. It might be a passing fad. Do an internet search on “management fads.” What sets many of them apart is the amount of time, energy, and budget that organizations spent in pursuing the capabilities that these fads advertised as highly desirous, if not out-and-out necessary for survival, only to have them later revealed as only marginally beneficial. Of course, PM isn’t a fad, but the existence of hypothetical business model modifications that are tends to taint any management science initiative that hasn’t been widely accepted for over a century. And now, for the Number One reason your organization is trying to stymie your advancement of the PM Capability, I give you…

1. Business Schools – Even Elite Ones – Have Been Teaching Slanted Theory For Decades. I have little empathy for accountants who complain that they have to put in excessive hours at work. Why? Because their mantra, which has made its way into every aspect of modern management theory, that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth,” has brought about this and other business model pathologies. After all, if the purpose of all management is to maximize shareholder wealth, shouldn’t you press for ever more output in the form of unpaid overtime from those very assets, as long as their variable costs do not go up? And it’s not just the accountants – every single salaried member of the staff is in the same situation. Quick organizational health indicator: if the staff is chronically overworked, with significant expectations of unpaid overtime hours, it means that that organization has bought into the “maximize shareholder blah blah blah” concept, and your time there is likely to be stressful.

This instance of management science reductionism stands in stark contrast to the raison d’etre of PM, with its focus on delivering the customers’ scope within the customers’ cost and schedule parameters. To engage in a bit of hyperbole, we don’t care if the assets are over- or under-worked, just that the scope is being accomplished on-time, on-budget. And, if it is, then we don’t worry if Project Team members aren’t putting in any overtime at all, or even (gasp!) taking the occasional afternoon off. As long as the client is happy, attempting to wring more (potentially excessive in addition to being unpaid) effort out of the Project Team is often counter-productive, in that it can lead to a decline in morale.  Of course common management theory holders are put off by the rise of Project Management’s codex. They are epistemologically inconsistent, and no narrative that insists on the supremacy of Asset Management over PM can remain intact if a successful PMO implementation demonstrates its worth. Such a PMO would establish that they, and their nominal approach to creating and maintaining the organization’s business model, are misguided.

Yeah, I know it’s dangerous to reverse engineer motives from observed behaviors, but I’m fairly confident that, if those opposed to implementing even the most basic of PM techniques were to be hit by one of those random flying sodium pentothal-tipped darts, and asked why they are opposed, they would admit to one of these three, or a derivative. Or, I suppose, they could actually be right in their opposition.

Nah.