Game Theory in Management

As we approach the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, part and parcel of the post-event analysis will include attempts to answer the question: how much did this cost us, and how much time did it remove from our productivity? Whether by nation, macro-organization, corporation, small business, or from the point of view of specific industries or families, the upcoming weeks and months will, no doubt, see many attempts at quantifying these impacts, usually in order to ridicule political opponents, but more importantly to ascertain those business strategies that are most effective at making the analyses’ target group more economically resistant to similar future occurrences. Unfortunately, both purposes of analysis invite quackery, and in massive proportions. Those who are supposedly looking to advance management science can be counted on to advance their own particular pet theories (although establishing how risk management [no initial caps] can help insulate organizations against pandemic shutdowns would be quite the reach, I fully expect something to be pushed that way). And yet, this serious question needs a serious treatment, regardless of charlatans muddying the waters. How can this be done, precisely? As fate would have it, I have some experience in this type of scenario, and the good news is that the solution is far simpler and easier to access than almost all of the alternatives often pursued, and that optimal approach comes from basic PM.

First, let’s dispense with the intuitive but nevertheless incorrect notion that estimators can deliver the information being sought here. They can’t, as is easily observed by considering the common practice among projects to derive a “bottoms-up” estimate at completion, or EAC. Back when I was working to attain my estimator’s certification I was taught that there were three types of estimates:

• Order or Magnitude, or “ballpark” estimate, derived by comparing your intended project to similar work done previously, and accounting for differences in size, function, geographic and inflation. The bases of comparison are published by organizations whose data has been shown to be consistently reliable; however, these estimates’ accuracy is rated between 45% and 60% of final costs.
• A Budget Estimate lists the intended resources by type (Heavy Equipment, Labor [by type], Overhead, Hotel Load, etc.), based on the most recent information for each category. Perhaps the most common type of estimate, these are rated at between 30% and 45% accuracy.
• A Detailed Estimate is usually produced by a professional estimator, using off-the-shelf software for that purpose, and is so detailed that it can be handed off to the procurement specialist to begin buying the labor and materials needed to work the project. This type of estimate is accurate to within 15% and 30%.

Keep that last accuracy bracket in mind as we proceed with this analysis – a professional estimator, using OTS estimating software, can be expected to be up to thirty points off of the real answer, and even the optimal scenario is 15% accuracy.

However, what’s being estimated here isn’t a project. It’s the impact of a Black Swan event (as described in the excellent book by the same name by Nassim Taleb) across a broad spectrum of organizations and projects. There is simply no reliable way of knowing what a “final impact” of any given occurrence, much less one with the massive, far-reaching impact of a pandemic, could have on any given subject. The trucking industry is being hard-pressed by the unavailability of the facilities that drivers need, and that can perhaps be quantified. But what about the impact of lower fuel prices? Yes, hotels are largely slowing down or shutting, but demand from on-line retailers is jumping. How to cross-evaluate these factors, and dozens, if not hundreds more like them? It’s simply impossible to do. Facilities such as restaurants can compare their pre-virus numbers to post-virus versions, but since when does any business, let alone an entire industry, experience level revenue figures across weeks, let alone months?

“Alright, Michael” I can hear GTIM Nation say, “how does one calculate the impact of a shutdown, as your title implies?” Here’s how it’s done, at least in project space.

Watch your Cost Performance Index (CPI) and Schedule Performance Index (SPI), at the cumulative level. For those new to these information streams, these are derived so:

CPI = BCWPcum / ACWPcum

SPI = BCWPcum / BCWScum

where BCWPcum is the cumulative Earned Value, ACWPcum is the cumulative actual costs, and BCWScum is the cumulative time-phased budget. What you will see happen is a sub-1.00 spike in both indices (1.00 is performance exactly as planned; below that number indicates trouble, for both indices) downward in the next couple of months, most likely more pronounced in SPI than CPI. Then, over the following few reporting cycles, you should see these figures climb their way back to where they were before, the speed with which they do so determined by the robustness of the subject organization. How accurate is this method? Studies have shown it’s good to within ten points. This method of impact quantification is not only accurate, but it’s best simply because it’s not predicated on the thousands upon thousands of parameters which, even if they were identifiable, cannot be reliably captured.

If you have no Earned Value Management System in place, two things: are you really doing Project Management at all? Secondly, well, I can’t help you.

Also, stay safe out there.

In last week’s blog I teased that I was going to reveal a strategy to deal with the natural human instinct to act out of self-interest well before the benefit of the group, after having established:

• The standard template for establishing a Project/Program Management Office (PMO) for the intent of advancing an organization’s PM maturity is both (a) ineffectual and (b) extremely susceptible to individuals looking out for their own interests over the goals of the macro organization, and
• Such self-interests-based behaviors cannot simply be rooted out, particularly and especially via attempts to leverage organizational power over the targeted groups (in other words, it’s very close to impossible to force an organization to advance its capability maturity, especially Project Management).

So, impossible puzzle, right? Maybe. I mean, after all this time and all the articles, columns, and, yes, blogs on the topic of the optimal strategy to advance PM within the macro organization, you would think that a workable solution would have been developed long ago. And yet, here we are, the universal acceptance (embrace, really) of the Asset Managers’ business world-view, while we PM-types can only point to an uneven utilization of our techniques, at best.

Before jumping into my ideal implementation strategy, I’d like to take a moment to examine the implications of the situation laid out in the previous paragraph. Let me state this now, loud and clear, and for the record:

The main reason that the Asset Managers’ take on management science dominates the business world and academia is solely based on governments’ need for tax revenue.

Not only is the previous sentence true, but any manager who has given it a few minutes thought knows it to be so intuitively. It is governments who see corporations as potential sources of revenue, and it’s the Asset Managers who maintain that the point of all management is to maximize said revenue. Individuals view corporations in terms of what those organizations can provide, and at what price point. It’s all the non-government actors in the free marketplace who care about things like quality, availability, and cost, which is another way of saying real people care about scope, schedule, and budget, the main three pillars of Project Management philosophy and science. Only those who are (at least) one step removed from the actual transactions that take place in free market economies are focused on things like taxable liability, or the “bottom line” on the Profit and Loss statement.

Now, allow me a moment to introduce a radical concept into the faculty lounge where all the “true” management science stuff is made up derived. The fact that the Asset Managers’ approach to monitoring any and all businesses’ fiscal performance must be in place prior to these businesses opening their doors HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO with whether or not the information streams emanating from such approaches represents an optimal (or even adequate) basis for making management decisions. Nothing. Unconvinced? Follow me on a little intellectual exercise.

Recall one of my previous assertions, that there are three types of management: Asset, Project, and Strategic, each with their own goals, methods, and information streams. What if governments taxed corporations on the basis of market share (i.e. the Strategic Managers’ realm)? Say, for every 10% of a given market controlled by a given corporation, the tax rate would be 5%, so that, for a monopoly, they would have to pay a 50% tax rate on gross revenue, and so forth. Do you think any business owner would give a second thought to the claimable depreciation rate on the copier just purchased? Or, what if (I love this one) those organizations engaged in project work could see their tax rates lowered based on the percentage of projects that came in on-time, on-budget? PMI® would, virtually overnight, wield far more power than any other professional organization.

(GTIM Nation: So, what’s this strategy already? Me: I’m getting there, honest.) This all comes back to the fact that human nature will always win over optimal management science techniques or strategies. Always. As long as the proper incentives are in place, advancing a specific management capability is going to be straight-forward and achievable. Absent the incentives that appeal directly to the decision-makers self-interest, those attempting to convince the macro organization to do things differently will always be on the outside, looking in.

In short, to advance the technical agenda of the PMO, stop hectoring other people with policies, procedures, and, well, nagging. Establish and articulate an implementation strategy that places PM techniques squarely within the organization’s pursuit of its members’ self-interest. If this requires a rejection of those PM guidance-generating orgs that mandate stuff like, oh, I don’t know, risk management (no initial caps), then that’s just too bad…

Although I generally like to avoid examples in extremis, I would like to review a virtual pandemic that hit a virtual world, one that I discuss at length in my second book, the book this blog is named after, Game Theory in Management. The subtitle to that book is the same as the subtitle to this blog, too: modeling business decisions and their consequences. The virtual plague took place in the World of Warcraft game, which is typically referred to as an MMORPG, or Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Its “world” is Azeroth, and players belong to one of two warring populations. However, within these populations are sub-groups, or tribes if you will, who do not necessarily work together in combatting their nominal enemies.

Into this setting was introduced a disease, the “Corrupted Blood” incident. In the words of Joel Hruska, from ExtremeTech, fifteen years ago,

The boss of the Zul’Gurub raid instance, Hakkar the Soulflayer, had a debuff he could apply to nearby players that caused damage every few seconds. The debuff was designed to kill players quickly enough that anyone without healer support would die fairly quickly.

Unfortunately, Blizzard made a mistake. Hunter pets, if put away while the debuff was applied, would still have it when they were pulled back out again — like, say, in a populated area. That was the first problem. The second problem was that Corrupted Blood was infectious, and spread to people nearby. The third problem? NPCs (non-person characters) could catch it. When they did, they didn’t die. They just transmitted it to everyone within range, indefinitely.[i]

In my research while writing Game Theory in Management, I came across stories of those characters with healing powers offering their services at inflated prices (supply and demand hold sway over virtual worlds as well as our own, it would seem), characters deliberately teleporting infected animals into enemy’s population centers (biological warfare), and, perhaps one of the more chilling virtual behaviors, characters would assume the role of journalists, approach population centers that may or may not have been infected and therefore deserving of quarantine, assess the situation from afar, and then re-position themselves at nearby road junctions to inform passerby of that center’s status – or not. It seems some characters were known to, shall we say, adjust the message depending on whether or not the recipient was of their own tribe or clan.

I would like to point out that, in spite of entreaties from Blizzard Entertainment for the players of World of Warcraft to initiate behaviors that would eradicate the plague within the game itself, insufficient numbers of players did so, necessitating a hard re-set of the entire shebang in order to rid Azeroth of the disease. In short, when called on to behave a certain way as to benefit the entire population, individual players in sufficient numbers elected to act out on their own interests, which prevented any but the most drastic of solutions from actually working.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

It has been my experience that the go-to implementation strategy for advancing Project Management within an organization (particularly large ones) entails some form of the following steps:

1. Tap into the energy generated by the organization’s realization that an advancement in PM is needed, usually due to some project (or projects) going off the rails in dramatic fashion.
2. Hire or promote “experts,” and create a Project Management Office (PMO), or at least a team that does PM.
3. The PMO/Team performs an analysis of the level of PM maturity in place, and creates a document for advancement.
4. The PMO/Team continues to generate documents, this round creating official policies or procedures, that mandates certain PM-related practices and artifacts.
5. Some projects will embrace the new techniques, but many will seek to opt out, either by asserting a basis for exemption from the procedures, or by engaging the silent veto/slow roll tactic.
6. To the extent that the organization’s major projects have improved their PM practices, overruns and late project completions are reduced, and the amount of energy that went into the creation of the PMO begins to dissipate.
7. With no major overruns or delays to justify the expense of all those experts in the PMO on the payroll, and with significant amounts of project work not adhering to the PM procedures, the need for the PMO begins to be challenged in the organization’s executive suites, until…
8. Another project disaster happens, and the cycle begins anew.

The behaviors of (most of) the organizations in this approach mirrors those of Corrupted Blood-inflicted Azeroth, in that no amount of urging individuals to act for the common good but not necessarily for their own benefit will bring about the desired macro-organizational change. Self-interest will always manifest itself – not universally, to be sure, but in sufficient amounts to keep the desired organization-wide change/maturity advancement from occurring. It’s simply human nature. That being the case, the solution to the self-interest problem must include…

Look at that! Out of pixel ink for this week. Tune in next week for tips on advancing PM in a macro organization driven by individuals predominantly looking out for themselves.

And please stay safe in this world.

[i] Retrieved from https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/307717-researchers-wow-corrupted-blood-plague-to-understand-coronavirus-infections on April 5, 2020, at 19:58 MDT.

Yes, you read this blog’s title correctly. The cliché, of course, is “the best and the brightest,” as if, upon representing these two populations in a Venn Diagram, the two circles would perfectly overlay each other. But, as I wrap up Game Theory In Management’s take on ProjectManagement.com’s March theme of leading PM trends, I’d like to examine those tests that organizations tend to employ when screening for sufficiently talented personnel to join their project teams, and their implications for advancing Project Management theory writ large.

Probably one of the most common tests is the number and type of college degrees held by the candidate, combined with their Grade Point Average, or GPA. In the hard sciences, these criteria come close to exclusivity. Make no mistake, I’m not necessarily against this standard. For example, without consistently high grades and a very good showing on the MCAT, students aren’t even admitted to medical schools, and I’m completely okay with that. But I would like to point out that, in business within a free market economy, the GPA element might be overrated. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, arguably the most successful business executives ever, actually dropped out of college. And in an article for CNBC.com by Kathryn Dill on Eric Barker’s book Barking Up The Wrong Tree,

A survey of over 700 American millionaires found that their average college GPA was 2.9. “College grades,” Barker writes, “aren’t any more predictive of subsequent life success than rolling dice.”[i]

If one considers the highly dynamic world of management, this probably won’t come as that much of a surprise. After all, what’s included in attaining high grades in school? In addition to hard work and some level of talent, a large dose of conformity is needed for such success. Although never articulated out loud, it’s a safe bet that all successful students are fully aware of the folly of correcting any teacher on any topic, even if (or especially if) said teacher goes off on a political or social-economic rant while supposedly teaching an utterly unrelated subject, like mathematics. GTIM Nation is well aware of my opinion of some of the foundations of current college-level management courses, predicated as they are on the absurd notion that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth.” In essence those who do really well in college-level business courses are taught two things that are utterly incompatible with Project Management, specifically:

• The Asset Managers’ take on business is the only correct one, and
• Really good managers will employ the staid analysis methods stemming from the previous assertion when they get a job in the real world.

Don’t misunderstand – I’m completely aware of the fact that the newly-assigned PM who has a working understanding of Work Breakdown Structures, Earned Value and Critical Path Methodologies, Cost Performance Reports in Format 1, Gantt Charts, and all the rest will have an immense advantage over her less-educated rivals. But throughout my time in Graduate Management School, which included two semesters of Accounting, two semesters of Finance, one of Statistics, and the usual Organizational Behavior and Performance and Strategic Management stuff, only once in the entire curriculum did any professor mention any of the skills from the previous sentence, and that was a one-class exercise in developing and analyzing a schedule network (in an Information Technology class, no less).

If GPA is a potentially flawed metric to use in predicting future performance, …wait! What did I just write? Did I use the phrase “predicting future performance?” Yes, yes I did. This calls for … the risk managers! Given the problem of assessing which Project Team candidates will represent the type of talent needed to advance PM in general, or come up with trend-setting ideas in the field in particular, what data should we feed our Monte Carlo or Decision-Tree analysis? That’s a really tough question, since, in the United States at least, it’s basically illegal for large organizations to consider any of the following factors when hiring:

• Gender
• Race
• Religion
• Marital Status
• Age
• Social-Economic status

…among others, and I’ve just established that, for PMs anyway, use of where the candidate went to college and the GPA is at least suspect. In short, for this predictive function, there’s simply no data that could be fed into two of the risk managers’ favorite tools that could possibly result in a usable information point.

Sooo…where does that leave us in our quest to find those who are most likely to do some PM trend-setting? Invoking Sir Arthur Helps is where that leaves us. He was supposedly the first person to write “Nothing succeeds like success.”[ii] The true trend-setters in PM are not those writing out their a priori assumptions ad nauseum, nor are they to be found in (most) college settings. They will be the ones who actually bring their various types of projects in on-time, on-budget, usually unceremoniously, but also usually consistently.

These might not be your brightest, but they’re your best.

[i] Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/24/what-happened-to-your-class-valedictorian-probably-not-much.html on March 29, 2020, 18:05 MDT.

[ii] Helps, Sir Arthur, Realmah, 1868, retrieved from https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/261100.html on March 30, 2020, 17:55 MDT.

GTIM Nation knows of my fondness for Shakespeare. In The Merchant of Venice, the lady protagonist, Portia, is to be wed the suitor who correctly chooses one of three caskets that contains her portrait. The caskets are made of gold, silver, and lead, and bear the following inscriptions:

• Gold: Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.
• Silver: Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.
• Lead: Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.

The male protagonist, Bassanio, chooses the SPOILER ALERT! STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW THIS PART OF THE PLAY WORKS OUT! lead casket and, with the dowry that comes with marrying Portia, is positioned to help rescue his friend and financier, Antonio.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

In previous blogs I’ve discussed an axiom that’s undeniably true, but seems to receive very little notice in management science discussions. PM’s own version of the three caskets: that, for any given good or service,

• Available, high quality is going to be expensive,
• Available, affordable is going to be of lower quality, and
• Affordable, high-quality is going to require a wait.

Proceeding from this premise, and circling back to ProjectManagement.com’s theme for March, of leading PM trends, I have to wonder which of the three characteristics is going to be satisfied or improved by the next major technological breakthrough in PM. Whichever technological advancement riddle is being addressed will have significant implications, including those ideological opponents who can be expected to be arrayed against the innovator. Recall also previous blog discussions on Thomas Kuhn’s profound work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that the maintainers of the current thinking have a vested interest in diminishing (if not out-and-out thwarting) the overturning of those theories that undergird their own “expertise” (or Portia’s hand in marriage, whatever).

For example, consider some future PM researcher who discovers a way to reliably pull actual (or a reasonably accurate) percent complete figures for all active Work Packages. That’s right: no Project Controls Specialist pestering the Control Account Managers in the last days of the reporting period for their percent complete estimates, only to be told “this is a level of effort task” when it clearly isn’t, and entering the 8.333% more-done-than-last-month silliness into the cost processor. Without the missing or clearly biased percent complete estimates, this new solution would reliably feed the organization’s Earned Value Management System (EVMS) with accurate Estimates at Completion (EACs, both cost and duration), Performance Indices (both cost and duration), current and cumulative variances (both … well, you know) – all quickly and easily. A quantum leap in quality in Management Information for the same (or even less) expense would have been attained, easily summoning the following opponents:

• Our friends, the accountants. They’ve been taught (ad nauseum) that all relevant cost information originates in the general ledger, and generally predict at-completion costs by assessing spending trends. And yet, here’s those pesky PM-types running laps around their very own Management Information System track. The value between bookkeeper and accountant just got much narrower, and none of the latter category will be happy about it.
• Some of the people supposedly within our own camp, specifically the risk analysts (no initial caps) and the estimators. The risk analysts want to use Gaussian curves to predict the future of performance on a project, but EVMSs can do so automatically, with a ten-point accuracy bracket, which the risk analysts could only dream of. Similarly, the estimators are given to developing an EAC by re-forecasting the remaining scope, and adding that figure to the project’s cumulative actuals. Not only would our automated and quality-controlled EVMS perform that function automatically (Budgeted Cost of Work Remaining + ACWPcum), but it can do one better: simply calculate the EAC. So, no, neither the risk analysts nor the estimators would be happy with this innovation.
• Don’t get me started on the guidance-generating organizations that waste spend so much pixel-ink on the need to “properly” match the percent-complete method to specific types of scope.

Similar opposition can be safely assumed to come about if the next innovation solves one of the other two riddles, Affordability or Availability. A system that’s both affordable and readily available will draw fire for being of low quality, even if the value of the MIS stream being made available performs at least as well as others deemed to be worthy – I’ve encountered it time and again. The only question then becomes How long will the innovation to make PM more affordable, available, or of higher quality be opposed before its benefits overcome its automatic objections?

Once such objections are made, and found to be wanting, those articulating the criticisms would do well to recall the words of the Prince of Morocco, after learning that Portia’s portrait is not in the gold casket he selected: “Portia, adieu. I have too grieved a heart To take a tedious leave: thus losers part.” (Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene VII)

Shorter version: I picked wrong, I’m outta here.