Project Management

The PMO That Barked, And Barked, And Barked…

From the Game Theory in Management Blog
by
Modelling Business Decisions and their Consequences

About this Blog

RSS

Recent Posts

Why Does It Work? Because I Said So!

Reasons Why Your Next PM Should Be A Collie

When PM Virtue Loses Its Appeal

Looking At Scantily-Clad Business Models

What’s Twenty Percent Of A PMO Good For?

Categories

Game Theory, PMO, Politics, Risk Management, Strategic Management

Date



In the Arthur Conan Doyle short story The Adventure Of Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes investigates the disappearance of a famous race horse, Silver Blaze, and the death of its trainer, John Straker. While the police’s primary suspect, Fitzroy Simpson, appears to have significant evidence against him, Holmes is struck by the fact that the stable’s dog did not bark as the theft was taking place. The precise dialogue is:

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?'
'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.'
'The dog did nothing in the night-time.'
'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes.”[i]

While the exact phrase “the dog that did not bark” does not appear in The Adventure of Silver Blaze, that phrase has become something of a cliché when it comes to describing a person, device, or organization that suspiciously does not perform as it should at a key time, indicating that something is very wrong. In fact, doing an internet search on “the dog that did not bark” will return results for both The Adventure of Silver Blaze and (typically) political manifestations of the cliché version.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

GTIM Nation knows of my oft-asserted claim that the primary purpose of the Project Management Office (PMO) is to put into the hands of the decision-makers the information they need to make, well, the best-informed decisions that they can. Does this strike my readers as being unduly narrow? Consider: when combined with Hatfield’s Rule Of Management #3, which reads:

  1. 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.

…then generating such information becomes macro-organization-changing. Organizations with a PMO that creates and presents Project cost and schedule performance information to management will enjoy a significant advantage over their poorer-informed competition, which is likely to manifest in superior portfolio performance. As for those PMO Directors (and their supporting consultants) who insist that the primary function of the PMO is to drive “culture change,” or lead execs to a point of view that a robust risk management (no initial caps) function is necessary, or that all PMs should be forced to “engage all stakeholders,” etc., etc., I have this to say: no, no, and (blank) no.

But even if the PMO Director is enlightened enough to accept my take on the PMO’s primary function, we still have some problems, perhaps best shown by the following Payoff Grid:

 

PMO Indicates Performance Issues

PMO Indicates No Performance Issue

Project is Performing Well

(A1) Stop barking!

(A2) It’s all good.

Project is Performing Poorly

(B1) It’s all good.

(B2) Why isn’t the dog PMO barking?

 

Let’s dispense with the “all good” scenarios. If the Project is performing well in cost and schedule space, and the management information systems operated by the PMO indicate as such, then things are working as they should. Similarly, if the PMO’s information streams are raising red flags, and the Projects indicated are actually performing poorly, then those information streams are working as intended, notifying upper levels of management where they should be focusing their time and energy.

Which brings us to our two something’s-very-wrong scenarios. In Scenario B2, the “Silver Blaze” scenario, the PMO is failing because a management problem is manifesting, but not being detected by the very systems designed to reveal it. This can lead to stolen race horses and killed trainers in the literary world, and overruns and delays in the project portfolio in the real one. Cost and schedule performance issues can be hidden from an otherwise-functioning Earned Value Management System (EVMS) by such chicanery as overstating the percent complete of a task, or employing the “bottoms-up” method of developing the Estimate at Completion, but the canny PMO Director will have sufficient surveillance to prevent this undermining of these systems.

As this blog’s title implies, I want to now look at Scenario A1, where the subject Project is actually performing well, but the PMO’s information streams indicate a problem. Besides misdirecting limited managerial attention away from real problems towards the non-existent variety, and putting PMs on the defensive unfairly, such false alerts directly damage the credibility of the PMO, an organization that depends heavily on the reliability of the information it processes and presents. This damage only gets worse if the reason behind the incessant barking is due to something supercilious, such as the lack of a risk management (no initial caps) system, or a perceived failure to “engage stakeholders,” or “change the culture.”

It’s elementary: that dog needs to shush.

 


[i] Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/82195-is-there-any-point-to-which-you-would-wish-to on November 16, 2024, 18:41 MST.

Posted on: November 22, 2024 09:39 PM | Permalink

Comments (1)

Please login or join to subscribe to this item
avatar
Eduard Hernandez
Community Champion
Senior Project Manager| Prothya Biosolutions Amsterdam, Netherlands
Great matrix, nothing to envy to Eisenhower's :-)

Please Login/Register to leave a comment.

ADVERTISEMENTS
ADVERTISEMENT

Sponsors