A Precise And Complete PM Codex Evades Us For A Reason

 

I started last week’s blog by quoting Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., in Psychology Today, from a piece entitled How Contradiction Can Generate Mental Disorder, specifically:

The human brain is hardwired to seek consistency; when persistent, unresolved internal contradictions arise between people's everyday decisional premises, it can generate mental stress that manifests in mental dysfunction.[i]

I went on to discuss the “persistent, unresolved internal contradictions” between Asset Managers’ vision, and that of Project Managers’, and how that difference of visions manifests itself in business models that reflect those very contradictions. But there is another set of these paradoxes that have nothing at all to do with the other types of management. They are, in fact, entirely internal to PM, and will tend to become apparent whenever an organization experiences a new Project Management Office (PMO) director, or even management team.

In most new-PMO-Director circumstances I’ve been a part of, and in all new-PMO-Team ones, the newcomers will carry with them a particular narrative, that goes something like this: I’m the best person for this position, otherwise I would not have been offered the job. The change took place because the owning organization perceived that it needed to take place, meaning that the previous technical approach to advancing PM in the macro-organization was found wanting. Since I’ve set up and/or led a successful PMO, anything that I come across that’s inconsistent with my previous successes will need to be rooted out, and then things will improve similarly to my already-experienced victories. By no means should this narrative be considered confined to new management – consultants are also highly vulnerable to adopting it, and poorly-trained auditors as well.[ii]

This entirely understandable narrative, unfortunately, will invariably run head-long into Chesterton’s Fence, which is

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.[iii]

When a new PMO Team is brought in from outside the organization, it’s been my (highly frustrating) experience that the extant staff is almost never evaluated with respect to their capabilities or talent. New executive teams tend to value one characteristic in the already-existing staff above all others: loyalty. The meek mediocrity who enthusiastically and unquestioningly embraces all of the newcomers’ changes will fare wildly better than the truly talented Team members who dare to suggest a pause before the new execs tear down the fence erected across the road.

PM as a discipline is more vulnerable to this effect than our friends, the Asset Managers, because of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP. GAAP is a rather precise codex, since, among other things, it serves as the basis for how governments collect taxes from corporations. Project Management, on the other hand, does not have generally-accepted anything (and for those purists who would point to the PMBOK Guide® as refutation, I would counter by pointing out how many revisions it has gone through). I’ve often asserted that you could put fifty PMs in a room, and they won’t agree on the color of an orange. With such a wide variance in what constitutes valid (let alone optimal) practices within the realm of PM, it’s small wonder that new PMO managers or teams not only have wide latitude to set up the strategies for advancing the capability within the macro-organization, it’s next to impossible to even-handedly evaluate their progress (or lack thereof) short of complete system failure. Accountants become aware that something’s amiss whenever they perform a trial balancing of the books. PMO Directors and/or their superiors won’t know if things are getting ready to fail catastrophically until a majority of the projects in the portfolio are coming in late and over budget, by which time it’s probably too late to correct.

But that’s kind of the nature of the PM beast. There are many more ways of successfully bringing in the highly varied types of projects than there are of setting up a chart of accounts in a general ledger. PM is somewhat resistant to formulaic approaches, and that’s okay. Kind of attractive, even.

[i] Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-would-aristotle-do/202105/how-contradiction-can-generate-mental-disorder on October 14, 2023, 20:55 MDT.

[ii] Well-trained auditors know to never simply walk into a PMO and criticize anything and everything that doesn’t match their conception(s) of a ”properly” functioning organization.

[iii] Chesterton, G.K., The Thing (1929), retrieved from https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ on October 24, 2023, 20:47 MDT.