Stop! Go! Wait…

 

I’m totally cool with this month’s ProjectManagement.com theme, that of visual project management. I’m a firm believer that, once the project controls staff has collected the relevant data, processed it into usable information via Earned Value and Critical Path methodologies, they need to deliver that information in not only a timely fashion, but in a format that’s sufficiently intuitive for the decision-makers to use. Let’s face it – for new PMs with little more business acumen than what they accidentally swerved into while they were pursuing their engineering degrees, hitting them with a PERT chart or a Cost Performance Report in Format I in their first project review meeting doesn’t really help them select the most appropriate strategies in pursuing their projects’ objectives.

That having been said, is there an opposite, equally inappropriate extreme? There’s no doubt about it. And Exhibit A has to be the so-called Stop Light Chart.

For most people, a traffic light is a very handy tool for conveying critical information in a short period of time. Red equals stop, green is okay-to-go, and yellow means clear the intersection (unless you’re like the taxi driver who took me from Logan International Airport into downtown Boston, where it means accelerate to the max, even if you are up to ¼ mile from entering the intersection). For professionals who suddenly find themselves in the role of Project Manager (hey, they don’t call it “the accidental profession” for nothin’) without ever having actually taken a management science course, the reduction of critical cost and performance information into one of these three familiar colors on a readily available report is tempting in the extreme. Green indicates good or acceptable performance, yellow means pay attention here, and red is pinned on those projects/tasks that are currently in trouble – easy, right? Well, not so fast…

On what grounds, exactly, are these categories assigned? If you have a task at the reporting level with a positive cost and positive schedule variance, green is clearly called for, as is red for negative-negative. But what if you have a positive cost, negative schedule, but the cost is way positive (>15%), and the schedule is barely negative <5%)? Is that yellow?

Here’s my heartburn: by the time the reporting system is dumbed down to one of three or four colors (blue = completed on-time), all sorts of irrelevant information becomes the basis for color determination. Before you know it, the cost determiner is a comparison of budgets and actual costs, which, of course, is irrelevant to real PMs, but not to amateurs. A chilling trend among many project organizations is to perform schedule “analysis” based on whether or not the responsible PMs believe they will attain their milestones on-time. This, dear readers, is not legitimate project management information. It is polling, masquerading as usable cost and schedule performance data.

One of the most important aspects of successful project management – if not the most important aspect – is the ability to identify what the project’s issues are, and what aren’t. A project manager’s time is limited, and a performance information system that returns false positives, or masks genuine problems in overly generalized and synthesized formats, virtually invites mis-directed energies. Worse, it helps prevent authentic systems from being introduced, since the bogus systems give the appearance of being able to keep the decision-makers apprised of the project’s goings-on.

But, hey, my Boston taxi driver got me to where I was going, apparently without noticing what the traffic signals were telling him (and, seemingly, little information coming in from an accurate visual assessment of the traffic around us), so your project should be okay.

Right?