A Not-So-Clear Vision of Project Success

 

I haven’t been to any major project management conferences for a while. It just seems that the vast majority of the papers presented fall into one of three general categories:

·         There are the traditionalists, whose presentations cover the basics of Earned Value or Critical Path Methodologies, but do so in such a way as to pretend that these techniques haven’t been around for generations. Their content is so chock-full of eat-your-peas-style hectoring that participants should receive double PDUs for simply enduring them.

·         Then there’s the Gaussian Curve crowd, mostly pushing some marginally-supported risk management theory, but sometimes schedulers who want to perform some inchoate statistical analysis on the amount of free float in certain phases of a project, blah blah blah, as if injecting massive levels of data elements into their analysis somehow validates their underlying hypotheses (hint: it doesn’t).

·         Finally, there are those whom I wish to review in this post: the participants in a successful project, who wish to relay to the hoi polloi the reasons why their project was so amazing.

The first mistake these people make is to try and conflate the project’s technical success with its managerial success. The two are not necessarily synonymous.  The Sydney Opera House may be a beautiful, one-of-a-kind, instantly recognizable landmark, but its project management was a train wreck. While there’s something about gee-whiz projects that seem to impart to all of their participants the aura of success, the opposite is also true: the Titanic’s launch was actually on-time (although her fitting out was delayed due to late changes in design), though I doubt many White Star Line employees were eager to point out their affiliation with her after 1912.

So, back to the convention centers’ and hotels’ conference rooms. Whenever you see the words “lessons learned” in a given presentation’s title or synopsis, and the project is not a known PM disaster, you’re being sold a bill of goods. Oh, I’m not saying the project being showcased wasn’t cool, or didn’t come in on-time, on-budget. I’m merely suggesting that the presenters will invariably have, shall we say, an interesting way of connecting the weighted milestone dots in such a way as to reflect on their virtue, or skill, or, most perniciously, an adaptation of a relatively unknown aspect of project management that made all the difference in the world, don’t you know.

For example, had ProjectManagement.com been around in 1939, and had held a convention (“What does ‘dot come’ mean?” “Beats me.”) the following could have been on the seminar’s docket:

Wednesday, 9:00, in the King George VI conference room, Project Analyst Naughta Bitatruth will discuss the successes of Nazi Germany’s zeppelin program as a function of superior project team communications. He will also discuss the negative perceptions being attached to the program from the recent Hindenburg incident, including:

·         The advantages of disposing of the hydrogen gas in such a way that it does not re-enter the atmosphere;

·         The additions to the pop culture that have come about due to the zeppelin program, including the introduction of the term “Oh, the humanity!”

Thursday, 12:00 noon, in the Rockefeller conference room, French Executive Advisor Compe’ Letnonsense will present the analysis that shows how superior risk management led to the on-time, on-budget completion of the Panama Canal. Compe’ will cover:

·         Use of the single-tier decision-tree analysis method to virtually eliminate the yellow fever and malaria threats to the project.

·         How, since a Monte Carlo analysis showed that it was a distinct possibility, the original efforts, costing $287,000,000, bankrupting the company and seeing the original PM sentenced to jail, should be viewed as a risk management success!

You’re familiar with the expression, Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. Well, success also has many optics.

But only a few of them are clear.