Ring Around The Collar (strikethrough) PMO

 

In 1968, a liquid laundry detergent company began an ad campaign that highlighted this product’s ability to clean the inside of (usually white) dress shirt so as to remove a line of dirt that would often form at the point that the shirt’s collar rubbed against the wearer’s neck. This “ring around the collar” problem was not, unfortunately, described in bland problem-needing-solution terms. Instead, the scandalous quandary would be pointed out to various men in front of their (presumed) wives by relative strangers, including a portrait artist, a carnival game attendant, and even (I swear I am not making this up) a pet parrot, who would utter those four damning words in tones ranging from apparent concern to straight-up mockery. The ads using this basic template must have been successful at some level – it ran for years, even though, watching those commercials today, I find them extraordinarily cringe-inducing, even for a marketing campaign over fifty years old.

That having been said, I do understand the underlying strategy. My parents ran their own advertising agency for much of my youth, and an axiom from that industry essentially posits that nobody is going to pay for a solution to a problem they aren’t aware that they have. And for those homemakers who were under the impression that their laundry detergent was getting their family’s clothes clean, well, they had a new cleanliness standard placed upon them now, didn’t they? Nevermind that casual strangers would have to be keenly observant to even notice a fine line of discolored fabric on the inside of a person’s collar – those homemakers would now know if their laundry-cleaning efforts should be considered sufficient by portrait artists, carnival game attendants, or even pet parrots. And, if not, then the only solution was clearly to change laundry detergent brands, don’t you know.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

While we PM-types are fairly comfortable with the notion that Project Management techniques, particularly the use of Earned Value and Critical Path Methodologies (EVM/CPM) to assess projects’ cost and schedule performance, are absolutely essential aspects of any business model, a lot (and I do mean a lot) of organizations that attempt to manage a significant PM portfolio never got that memo, and it shows. While the necessity of maintaining an accurate accounting system based on a significant codex of rules (Generally Approved Accounting Practices, or GAAP) is required by law for any licensed business in virtually all civilized nations, there really isn’t an equivalent standard for setting up and maintaining PM practices. Yes, of course, there’s the PMBOK Guide®, but it’s not as if it carries the force of the law. So, given that our friends, the accountants, do have the force of the law behind their implementation efforts, how do we PM-types even approach the level of managerial technique-adoption across the business world that they enjoy?

There are several tactics that I’ve observed, each with varying levels of success. Some United States Government agencies actually mandate a certain level of PM competence as a precondition for contract award, and will use audit techniques to ensure compliance. While largely successful for those contractors that participate, this approach actually led to a whole sector of PMs and Project Controls Specialist who assumed that implementation of basic (if not advanced) cost and schedule performance measurement systems was rather automatic, with no need for a separate implementation strategy. Outside of a customer base that insisted on appropriate, demonstrable PM practices, techniques, and their accompanying artifacts, this was absolutely not the case.

What about those organizations that aren’t under any codified pressure from their customers to adopt any sort of standardized PM approach? I can’t count the number of paper presentations I’ve attended at PM-oriented seminars that were either predicated on the “my project is totally awesome because we did Project Management right!” or its dark-imaged opposite, basically eat-your-peas-style hectoring to perform PM techniques the way the presenter expects. If either of these approaches has ever worked, it’s news to me. I think these two approaches might actually alienate executives who may have been previously disposed towards introducing some form of PM techniques into the fabric of their organizations’ business models.

Then we have those organizations that have a significant project portfolio, with either no or a minimal PM influence on its work execution, with no customer compulsion nor subject matter expert-based persuasion leading it towards an even basic PM capability maturity. Unless they are major players in some form of protected industry, these will be subject to perhaps the harshest teacher of all, the free market and its survival-of-the-fittest management environs. Sometimes all it takes is for a major overrun or delay on a high-dollar or high-profile project to get the execs on-board with advancing PM maturity. If they can correct their cost/schedule performance in time, they have a real shot at surviving. If they don’t, then their organizations will be overtaken by their more PM-savvy competitors.

But all of that takes time. A quicker solution to the problem of how to macro-advance PM techniques across entire industries might be to purchase a bunch of parrots, teach them to say “You’re going to fail without PM!” over and over, and send them to the appropriate CEOs. Hey, it worked for a certain laundry detergent company, didn’t it?