Overthinking It

 

I’ve recently received a rash of e-mails and snail-mails, offering classes on how to become a better business writer. The one I received on Friday had in-between my name and the rest of my mailing address an entry that was, I suppose, my profession: “Author, Blogger.” Now, I understand these things sometimes happen, and I’m sure virtually all of my readers who are already PMP®s still receive communications offering classes to attain the PMP®. Sometimes a reference to their PMP® is even included in the mailing address. I’ve even been spammed by a company in the Middle East that teaches portfolio management (ProjectManagement.com’s April theme) that uses my first book as its text (Things Your PMO Is Doing Wrong, PMI Publishing, 2008). But when I noticed the uptick in the number of business writing classes I was being offered, I had to stop to think – was this an attempt from Cameron to subtly let me know that I had to up my game? Did he pass my e-mail and contact information to these guys, or are the offerors really unaware that I’ve been writing professionally about business in general, and project management in particular, for some time? One of the brochures named its instructor, a fellow who apparently has never even published a book on business.

It’s not as if I could just shoot an e-mail to Cameron, saying, “Yo, Cameron, are you doing this?” For one, if he was behind this trend, then asking him if he was could be taken as an additional sign of my cluelessness. And, if he wasn’t, but I accused him of being behind it, then he would instantly recognize that I was overthinking it.

But, seriously, isn’t that what portfolio managers are supposed to do? Because when we start talking about PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT (oooooh!), the automatic implication is that those engaged in that enterprise (pun intended) are soooo much more broad-minded than the rest of us project managers, mired, as we are, in our Agile, or Scrum, or Critical Path Method echo-chambers. Consider the following payoff grid (we Game Theory hacks love these things):

Now consider the portfolio manager, at the receiving end of a barrage of management information streams, situated similarly to a 50-pound catfish at the base of a dam’s spillway, trying to decide what’s good to eat (for a catfish, anyway), and what’s not. The information bits come streaming by, and they belong to one of the categories in the above table (Here’s an easy hint: virtually everything your risk manager tells you is in category 2). What’s the worst thing that a portfolio manager can do? Isn’t it to underthink things, to mis-identify something that is, in actuality, in category 4, as being instead from categories 1-3? And then, not acting on it until it’s too late? Clearly, if the error to avoid at all costs for the portfolio manager is to underthink things, then the only other two outcomes are to either think the exactly appropriate amount (which is next to impossible), or else to overthink them.

What the portfolio manager needs is a structure, a systemic method for identifying which information streams are truly relevant, and in what situations. Such a structure would take into account the three levels of information topics:

·         Internal to the organization;

·         External to the organization itself, but internal to its economic base (customers and potential customers), and, finally

·         External to both the organization and its customers, but internal to its business environment, i.e., the competition and government.

Some freakishly talented CEOs have a natural sense of how these three different management arenas interact and influence each other, but the rest of us could use a little help from our computers. So, how do you set up your management information systems to collect the pertinent data, process it correctly, and deliver the needed information to actually perform portfolio management? I cover this topic at length in my second book – or, you can just keep reading ProjectManagement.com blogs.

Assuming, of course, Cameron doesn’t fire me because he really was behind the whole writing-classes-marketing-onslaught thing, and I’m just not getting it.