Sherlock Holmes was famous for being oblivious to the purely cultural goings-on in late 19th Century London. Whenever Watson would express dismay at Holmes being unaware of some (then-) popular trend or occurrence, Holmes would explain his tendency to avoid committing to memory any fact that had no relevance to his capability of solving mysteries, or investigating crimes. His mental acuity, he would explain, would be diminished if he were to expend energy on keeping up with trendy social goings-on. If it wasn’t relevant to his primary purposes, Holmes wanted nothing to do with it.
Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…
Seasoned members of GTIM Nation are well aware of my conditions for usable management information, that it be:
- Accurate,
- Timely, but, most of all,
- Relevant!
In a way, the first two of these point to the third. Inaccurate data is not only irrelevant, but also potentially debilitating to the formulation of any usable management strategy derived from it. And, as realized information ages from actionable to historical, it clearly loses its relevance. So, much as the realtors’ axiom, that real estate is all about “location, location, location” points to location being the primary determiner of its worth, the value of Project Management information basically boils down to its relevance. This is one of the reasons I’m so put off by the risk management (no initial caps) industry. For all of their ballyhooed techniques and overwrought approaches, the product they deliver is almost always irrelevant, little more than garden variety management anxiety tripped out in Gaussian Curve jargon.
Imagine a scale, with completely irrelevant information streams on one end, and information that’s so accurate, timely, and relevant that possession of it constitutes such a competitive advantage as to almost guarantee success. I would also like to put to mind Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rule of Management #3, which reads:
The 80th percentile best managers who have access to only 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be consistently out-performed by the 20th percentile worst managers who have access to 80% of the information so needed.
It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: irrelevant information does nothing to help obviate any decision. In fact, it may well either distract from the relevancies, or even point in the wrong direction.
Timely, accurate, and relevant information has been known to change the course of history. At the Battle of Midway (early June, 1942), the American naval forces were outnumbered, with technically inferior aircraft (the torpedo bomber in front-line use at the time, the Douglas Devastator, was virtually obsolete) and less experienced crews. The sole advantage that the Americans had over the Japanese attacking fleet was their information. The US Navy knew beforehand virtually the entire Japanese order of battle, due to a partial breaking of their naval code. Yet this one advantage proved to be the deciding factor in the Allied victory. Now, I have used this example in previous blogs, contrasting the difference between knowing, say, the course and speed of the Japanese aircraft carriers in late May/early June 1942, as opposed to how many barnacles were attached to their hulls, to highlight the difference between pertinent and pointless information. This comparison was, perhaps, unfairly simplistic, since a barnacle-adjacent piece of data, like the course and speed of said barnacles, would be highly relevant, indeed.
So where does, say, general ledger information appear on my scale? That depends on how much the organization’s business model is based on the Asset Managers’ (invalid) axiom, that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth.” More nuanced and sophisticated business models, ones that recognize the value of PM-specific information streams (e.g., cost and schedule performance) in guiding executive decisions, will certainly make use of accounting data, but won’t base every decision on profit-and-loss considerations. Even middling portfolio management capability can’t be attained without program-wide use of Earned Value, which is (generally speaking) exclusively within the PMO’s purview. Given these parameters, I’m okay with placing balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements on the “Highly Relevant” side of my scale; but, if Earned Value and/or Critical Path Methodologies are absent from the array of Management Information Systems (MISs), then something is definitely wrong.
On the “Acutely Lacking In Relevance” part of my scale, I would place the Communications Specialists (maybe not on the extreme end, but definitely that side of the mid-point), particularly the ones who espouse the “engage all stakeholders” business. Depending on the types of scope in the Project portfolio, the Quality Management crowd’s output is probably best placed somewhere in the middle of my scale, since I have yet to see a PM seize upon an Ishikawa diagram and rush out to the construction site, shop floor, or Agile/Scrum meeting to announce a major change in technical approach.
As for risk management’s (no initial caps) place on my scale, I’m with Sherlock Holmes here – I wouldn’t want anything impertinent influencing my analysis or decisions. One would be better served deriving a business strategy from Taylor Swift lyrics.
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