Flawed Reasons for Avoiding Project Management, Part 2
From the Voices on Project Management Blog
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Date
In
my previous post I addressed two common, but profoundly flawed, reasons team members offer up to avoid implementing the systems to sustain project management capability. Here are reasons three through one:
Objection 3: "If the cost and schedule performance reports indicate a negative variance, upper management will go on the attack, even if the reports are wrong."
I'm sure this happens. What makes this objection so astonishing disingenuous, though, is that it's obviously an indictment against upper management, not the information system itself.
Once a project has been baselined, the primary value of the work breakdown structure (WBS) is that it enables variance to be traced to their root causes. This analysis, known as "drilling down" through the WBS, quickly reveals if the variance is indicative of a genuine problem or simply a data anomaly.
It it's a real problem, then is it not appropriate for management to get involved? And, if you're getting beat up over non-problems, then the cost/schedule system is still doing you a favor: It's telling you that you need to get another boss.
Objection 2: "If the cost and schedule performance reports indicate a positive variance, upper management will want budget/money back."
In addition to the problems with this objection addressed in No. 3, this push-back tactic is often indicative of a padded baseline. When creating the budget, some control account managers will inflate line items as a hedge against project risk. If all goes as planned for, say, the first half of the project, any earned value system worthy of the name will identify padded baselines and the extent to which they are overstated.
The correct approach, of course, is to produce as honest a cost baseline as possible and then perform a risk analysis for identifying an appropriate contingency fund.
But for those who don't want to go through the trouble of doing it right, the cost/schedule performance system represents quite the check against this particular cheat.
Objection 1: "We don't need earned value or critical path to provide us with cost or schedule information because we're using (fill in the name of another system here)."
As I discuss in my book,
Things Your PMO Is Doing Wrong [PMI, 2008], one of the most effective but non-legitimate tactics is to employ rival systems.
The quick reason behind this is that there is no project cost control without earned value, and it's next to impossible to control a schedule without critical pat, and anyone who asserts to the contrary is either insufficiently skills or attempting to deceive.
Most of the time, it's not lack of skills in play.
Feel free to offer your comments, and have a fantastic New Year!
Posted
by
Michael Hatfield
on: December 23, 2009 12:09 PM |
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