“Scotty, I need warp speed in three minutes or we’re all dead!”

 

…and if you’re a PMO Director, you will often have less time than that.

In one of my earlier, high-falutin’ gigs, I was making presentations on portfolio cost and schedule performance to some senior-level executives. A canny assistant to one of them took me aside one day, and told me “Listen, Michael, these guys may be masters of the universe, but they have the attention spans of fourth graders. Whatever you put in front of them has to arrest their interest inside of 30 seconds, or they’re checking the view of the butterflies out the window.”

This advice reminded me of my path-not-taken career, in advertising. My parents ran an advertising agency while I was growing up, and they spent time schooling me in the industry (and were somewhat taken aback when, upon attaining my undergraduate degree, I became a site rat at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, but that’s another story). For print ads, the rule of thumb was that you had no more than 3 seconds to attract the readers’ attention with your headline; and, if you got them that far, no more than an additional 10 seconds for them to grasp the essence of the entire ad.

Does it strike anyone else as odd that many key decisions, from which types of projects to pursue to where to spend the household’s furniture budget, are so often determined by (relatively) snap decisions, or, at least, snap persuasion? I suppose it’s just part of human nature, a part that bodes very well indeed for us Project Management types (finally!).

My regular readers are, by now, used to my carping about the intellectual vacuousness inherent in the asset managers’ (read: accountants’) automatically-accepted meme of having all of the inside information the organization needs with respect to cost, budget, and project performance. But what do they have, really? The general ledger’s two main (only?) outputs are the balance sheet, and the profit-and-loss statement. Funny thing is, only a fraction of the people who use the term “the bottom line is…” really know how to perform an advanced interpretation of the profit-and-loss statement, and even fewer non-bookkeepers can make heads or tails of the balance sheet. These report formats are literally medieval, arriving around the time of Machiavelli (a coincidence?).

Now, that’s not to say that we PM types are incapable of inducing instant MEGO (a P.J. O’Rourke-ism, short for “my eyes glaze over”) by insisting on generating our cost/schedule performance information in the 1960’s era Cost Performance Report, Format I, or, for the uninitiated, the familiar (well, to us, anyway) Gantt Charts. But, once we move away from these staid formats, the sky’s the limit. One of my favorites is the calculated Variance at Completion histogram.

First, calculate the project’s at-completion costs. A simple but surprisingly accurate formula is:

EAC = ACWPcum / % Complete

… where EAC is the estimate at completion, ACWPcum is the cumulative amount of actual costs on the task or project, and % Complete is the estimate of the task’s percent complete. Next, subtract this figure from the budget at completion (BAC), and you have the calculated variance at completion. For the piece de resistance’, arrange these figures in a table in a spreadsheet, and sort on their values, lowest to highest. Use this to set up a histogram – color all of the overruns red, and all of the underruns green. Include this graphic in your next presentation to the executives, and the following will happen:

·         Since it’s a far more intuitive format than anything the accountants have, you will surpass them easily when it comes to conveying critical cost performance information; so, naturally, they will envy you.

·         The PMs of the projects on the far left side of the graphic will be instantly shown to be heading up losing efforts, and by how much. Since they will have normally escaped such scrutiny, they will not appreciate being so exposed.

·         The executives, on the other hand, will greatly appreciate being so graphically alerted to the problem projects within their portfolios, and will love you for it.

However, you need to beam this information into the heads of your organization’s decision-makers quickly, which means the adoption of a more visual venue than you may be used to. Which reminds me – from the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, two minutes and fifty seconds after Kirk’s demand quoted in this blog’s title, a bridge officer reports “Captain! The mains are back on-line!” He knows this because he is looking at … a histogram!