George Jetson, Bring Me A Rock!

The Jetsons was an animated situation comedy by Hanna-Barbera, aired originally in 1962, but set one-hundred years into the future, in 2062. Where The Flintstones was set in the Stone Age, The Jetsons was its futuristic counterpart, and depictions of how the titular family lived were both colorful and fanciful. The family’s patriarch, George, worked (will work?) for Spacely Sprockets, where his job appeared primarily to arrive at work (via flying car, of course), take a moving sidewalk to his control panel/desk, and press a single button. If the reason why George was uniquely qualified for this task was mentioned, I don’t remember it (and, just for the record, I was too young to watch it when it first aired – I saw it in reruns).
Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…
Efforts to more fully integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the PM world have some level of fascination for me. Make no mistake – I am absolutely not an AI alarmist, but I can see a certain scenario unfolding that would make us PMs’ lives harder, and it has to do with this idea that critical information streams can be had rather simply, simply because technology is advancing. After all, if the readily-available AI bots out there can write up a believable Baseline Change Proposal or Variance Analysis Report, how much harder could it be to produce more complex, enterprise-wide PM documents and reports?
Here is where The Jetsons and the traditional “bring me a rock” exercises come together. Quick reference: a “bring me a rock” exercise is when a superior in your organization wants you to produce a certain thing, but their scope definition is, shall we say, wanting. You take your best shot at delivering what you believe your superior has requested, only to learn that what you produced is certainly not meeting expectations. The dead giveaway that you are in a BMAR cycle is when the requestor can’t be any more specific about what it is that they desire. You leave the presentation upbraided and frustrated, without really knowing why, and needing to come up with some other rock solution to see if that gets any closer to fulfilling the original ask. The unfortunate confluence that I can see unfolding happens when so-called “enterprise” management information systems become the metaphoric “rock.”
You see, plenty of these “enterprise” systems promise highly valuable information streams at (almost literally) the touch of a George Jetson-esque button. The problem is that the specific information streams that are held to be highly valuable vary from manager to manager, organization to organization. For example, consider the numerous sources needed to generate an informed facility resource plan for the next, say, fiscal quarter:
·Available resources, both human and non (payroll, inventory, facility management system, etc.),
·Programmatic load (General ledger, scheduling system),
·Anticipated programmatic load (contract backlog, proposal backlog),
·Gap analysis of the existing programmatic load to the existing resource profile (the previous bullet’s data, plus HR [projected adds] and facility capacity),
·Gap analysis of the projected programmatic load and projected resource capacity,
…among many others. There is simply no way any one computer program could synthesize this information stream reliably, even if it could successfully crawl all of the data sources it would need, which is itself unlikely. Keep in mind that this is just one product that would be expected out of an enterprise-wide system. If one were to add in other, more complex information-starved decisions (such as whether or not to respond to Request for Proposals on scope that is similar, but not identical to, the existing portfolio), and the highly improbable nature of such a comprehensive Information Technology program becomes clearer.
And those issues manifest even before other, more fundamental ones would have to be definitively resolved. For example, ask a typical PM how to generate an Estimate at Completion, and she will likely respond “Easy! Divide the Cost Performance Index into the Budget at Completion.” Pose the same question to a member of the same organization’s Finance and Accounting department, and he will likely respond “Easy! Take the average monthly cost expenditures for that Project, normalize it by the number of working days in each month, and then project that figure out for the remainder of the period of performance.” Each is likely to be supremely confident that their way is the right one (though the F&A fellow shouldn’t be); but, unless this enterprise system has been told how to approach this particular data processing point, it’s going to generate an “answer” that is only useful to a fraction of the macro-organization.
So, here’s my ultimate take-away: if your organization has been sold on some software company’s promises of an on-demand, reliable, all-encompassing information stream that renders their high-level decisions intuitively obvious, step back, take a breath, and ask: “Can you be a little more specific about what, exactly, that output looks like?"