When All You Have Is A PM Hammer…

A few blogs back I kvetched extensively about Information Technology (IT) project sponsors being unable or unwilling to specify their expected output, describing it as a derivative of “bring me a rock” syndrome[i] . But, to be intellectually honest, its supply-side counterpart is just as irksome and dangerous to IT project success, and that counterpart is this: the idea that the Project Controllers or IT PM’s favorite tool is the solution to producing the executive’s sought-after management information stream, when it certainly is not. It’s not only counterproductive to attaining the desired Project outcome, it actually turns its advocates into compromised hacks, who only need a small amount of organizational power to become completely insufferable.
Before I examine this phenomenon at length, let’s take a second to zoom out of the Project portfolio-level information streams, and ask the basic question: what information do successful PMs crave? And why? GTIM Nation is familiar with my take on the Pareto Principle when it comes to management information, that the 80^th percentile best managers who have access to 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be consistently out-performed by the 20^th percentile worst managers who have access to 80% of the information so needed. This being the case, even middling management talent will look like superstars if they are on the receiving end of timely, accurate, and relevant PM information on a sufficient scale.
Enter the PM software providers. The ones who can provide this level of PM information, particularly from a unique perspective, will have very little problem monetizing such technology in the PM universe. (In a little bit of AI-related irony, if such a stack of algorithms is ever developed, the clear implication is that AI will come for our PM jobs sooner rather than later. Don’t worry – it will never happen. Probably.) Hence the rush to market one’s cost and schedule performance measurement system(s) as being whole portfolio controlling-worthy, if not the entire enterprise.
This error is the mirror image of the one I’ve been accusing our friends, the accountants, of making for almost my entire writing career. No organization can be optimally (or even workably) managed from the information derived exclusively from the general ledger. Oh, sure, the “maximize shareholder wealth” adherents may disagree, but outside of them, and the academics who teach such dribble, the previous sentence’s assertion is undeniably true. So, what are we to make of the PM specialist who insists that a Critical Path or Earned Value Management-based system, even one claiming “enterprise” status, can answer the questions surrounding the pressing issues bandied about in the board room? Should we not view them with the same skepticism as the general ledger aficionados?
And here an additional irony becomes apparent. The Project Controls Specialist who has become an expert on Platform X, and is convinced that this particular software generates the highly sought-after information stream that will turn those middling PMs into superstars, will push Platform X, usually to the exclusion of any and all other systems. In doing so, they present as a quasi-expert in the utility of Project Management writ large, as if to reject Platform X is to reject all of the PM codex. Again, no one Management Information System (MIS) can hope to provide a majority – or even a plurality – of the information needed to obviate the decisions required to bring even the most anodyne projects in on-time, on-budget. In essence, the one pushing the one-platform solution ends up not only discrediting themselves (and their favorite MIS) when the final product is glaringly short of expectations, they make the whole of PM look unsatisfactory as a management science endeavor by this extended act of reductionism.
In case I haven’t been clear in the previous paragraphs, let me say this: there is no single MIS that can collect the data, process it into information, and deliver that information in a format that the decision-makers can use to arrive at all optimal (or even workable) PM decisions on a consistent basis, claims of being able to manage the “enterprise” notwithstanding. To disagree with the previous sentence is to engage in the previously-mentioned reductionism on a grand, PM-oriented scale. Further, it undersells the utility of PM techniques, approaches, and strategies in such a way as to imply that we PM-types can, indeed, be replaced by Artificial Intelligence bots.
And I will never accede to that, because it’s simply not so. So, put down the hammer.



[i] Hatfield, Michael, George Jetson, Bring Me A Rock, https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-post/80094/george-jetson--bring-me-a-rock-..