A Surprise From The PM Career Advancement Payoff Grid

 

There may well be an unwritten rule that any blog entitled “Game Theory in Management” can only go so long before using the Game Theorists’ favorite analytical tool, the Payoff Grid. Add to that ProjectManagement.com’s theme of career advancement, and a natural fit pops to the surface. It seems to me that, when considering career advancement within Project Management, the two main issues are (A) is the person within the field seeking advancement actually worth said advancement?, and (B) are they actually progressing within the PM realm? Based on these two questions, the Payoff Grid presents so:

Let’s address the way-it-should-be scenarios first. If you’re good at PM, and you’re advancing within the industry satisfactorily (1B), then this analysis won’t apply to you individually, but may have a significant bearing on you as part of an organization, which I’ll cover presently. Similarly, if you are new to PM, or not very good at it (2A), it’s truly appropriate that you are not advancing in the industry until such a time as you improve the quality of your contribution(s) to the nominal Project Team. Which brings us to the two dysfunctional scenarios, 1A and 2B. I think that, when addressing the subject of career advancement within Project Management, the natural implication is that there’s a large population of PMs in Scenario 2B, and there very well may be. But if that is the case, then I believe that a primary driver of that state of affairs is the population in Scenario 1A. Here’s why.

Permit me to state the obvious: those who don’t do PM very well advancing in the organization is a bad thing. Besides bringing with them, ahem, sub-optimal ideas for incorporation into the organizations’ business models (cough, risk management, cough), their inability to significantly (or even noticeably) improve their Project Teams’ capacity to deliver scope on-time, on-budget will place, not only them, but PM writ large square into the cross-hairs of our friends, the Accountants’, favorite Team-defunding analysis method, the Return on Investment. Why waste all that budget on a group of people adhering to the PM discipline when they have little to show for it, or not enough to justify the original PMO expenditure?

Then we have the propensity for poor Project Management to have a delayed effect on the projects’ outcome. A PM who sets up an invalid Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) at the beginning of the work probably won’t experience the skewing effect on that project’s Cost and Schedule performance measurement systems until close to the end of the project, or until after it’s too late to easily remedy. With detection of backward PM skills somewhat detached from the most likely outcome, it becomes a bit easier for inept PMs to escape the consequences of their poor decisions.

Let’s not forget that the two least desirable Maccoby Archetypes[i], The Jungle Fighter and the Company Man, have special skills in distancing themselves from the project-failure consequences of their actions. Jungle Fighters are, by their nature, adept at hovering close to Projects on a trajectory towards success, while subtly distancing themselves from those headed south, their actual level of genuine participation notwithstanding. And Company Men are pre-disposed towards an attitude that completing the Project on-time, on-budget is only a desirable outcome if it can be established that they had followed all of the organization’s rules and policies. Organizational loyalty is often the coin of the realm in newly-formed PMOs, with genuine talent taking a back seat, so that successful Project completion while outside the confines of the rulebook can be twisted into a career-limiting event. It’s both an attitude and naturally-following defense, with the result being the same as the Jungle Fighters’ – it’s rather difficult to hold them accountable for their poor PM choices.

So, yeah, if you are genuinely good at doing PM, but your career trajectory is lagging behind where it could be reasonably placed, you have every right to be frustrated. But I would assert the causal element behind such frustration should not be automatically imparted to PM’s techniques not receiving traction within the business world in general. I think that a not-insignificant factor lies in those PMs who are getting ahead, but shouldn’t.

To paraphrase Pogo (Walt Kelly), we have met the enemy, and some of them are us.

[i] In The Gamesman, The New Corporate Leaders (1977), the brilliant Michael Maccoby posits four corporate personnel archetypes: The Craftsman cares deeply about his output, but not so much about the organization around him; The Company Man tends to assume the persona of the organization around him; The Jungle Fighter gets ahead through calumny and other cloak-and-dagger tactics; and The Gamesman sees his renumeration not as food on the table or a roof over his head, but as tokens in some grand game being played.