PMdA: Project Management Disasters
This article is the first in the series of essays on project management. PMdA aims to provide a systematic, and empirical analysis of modern project management methods.
Projects need to be managed. Apparently.
There doesn’t seem to be any tangible proof that project managers add any value, productivity or substance to projects.
An inquisitive mind tends to always ask why certain things are done a certain way. A dull mind accepts things as they are; but dull minds are not known for solving problems.
The idea of why projects need to be managed, in the first place, may seem irreverent and perhaps dangerous. But it is worth pursuing.
If we were to ask, what real value do project managers add to projects, what would be the answer?
Project management (note the emphasis on the ‘management’ part), seems to be a patently anti-scientific discipline. Most business managers generally accept that any project needs a project manager; supposedly to manage a project. If an inquisitive mind were to ask why a project manager is required, he would summarily be asking a heretical question.
There doesn’t seem to be any tangible proof that project managers add any value, productivity or substance to projects. The empirical evidence is non-existent. The general idea, or more accurately, belief, is that projects will go wrong without a project manager. The major problem, though, with belief systems is that, by design, they cannot be disproven.
Try disproving them. And let me know how it went.
The primary reason for the non-disprovability of beliefs is that any belief is self-reinforcing. It is what any passionate believer in Christianity faces when debating an Atheist on Youtube. The believer knows ‘all the facts’ for his position, and the non-believer also knows ‘all the facts’ for his position. They will almost certainly walk away from their little debate even more convinced of their respective positions. This is also known as confirmation bias.
The secondary reason for the non-disprovability of beliefs is that one tends to develop a blind-spot for contrarian evidence. Naturally, we have limited memory, and our world is extremely complex. As a result, we have come up with a very efficient method for storing information. That method is to simply and quickly forget any data that we sense might not add value; or (most-likely), makes us sleep less soundly at night.
A plan translates into a defiance of empirical, and natural law realities.
The project management discipline lacks the empirical rigour that often goes alongside the very project outputs being managed (e.g. bridge construction is an empirical discipline, i.e. civil/structural engineering).
It is unclear why this is the case. Most likely, the idea of planning (in project management) was conceived by minds that are inherently anti-scientific. A plan, quite clearly, is the most unflinching belief statement. A plan translates into a defiance of empirical, and natural law realities.
At the risk of sounding like a proponent of an alternative ‘anti-plan’ belief system, consider the following:
Firstly, there is no evidence, whatsoever, that plans improve productivity or efficiency, in any way.
Secondly, consider the incredible and overwhelming evidence of plans that grossly underestimated time required, resources required and the level of uncertainty to other elements of a project (e.g. theft of material/equipment, change in material prices, change of project requirements/scope-creep).
To be clear, plans probably do add some value. I am not sure nor convinced they do. The point is that I require scientific evidence to see their usefulness. Currently, almost all evidence points to the contrary.
There are many dearly held beliefs in the project management world that have little to no empirical evidence: the role of project manager, the project plan, the ‘responsibility’ (assignment) matrix, and the ‘comprehensive’ requirements document (the kind more than 10 pages long in 12point font, no images).
I imagine various kinds of reasons for why some of these beliefs are so dearly held. A reason may be regulations regarding how a project of a certain nature is required, by law, to be undertaken. Another reason may be that, that is what the lawyers require for a contract to be signed between the customer and the supplier. (In which case, one solution may be to remove the lawyers in this sort of engagement. If possible.)
The current confusion in project management methods concerns a conflation of what the law requires (leaving little to no options to the team in charge of a project), and what is empirically a necessity to have a successful project. At the end of the day, if one is bold enough, the law can be changed to adapt to the empirical results. John Hughes, for example, is one bold man who is so committed to the empirical approach when it comes to software testing, that he found a bug in one of the embedded-software protocol safety standards for Automotives. The concerned standard was consequently updated.
At the risk of sounding dangerously unorthodox, the empirical approach should always supersede the legal (hence the suggestion to entirely remove lawyers in project contracts or reviews) or ‘traditionally accepted’ approaches.
The astonishing reality of project management methods is that new ones keep coming up almost every 5 years since the 60’s. Gannt Charts, Systems Engineering, Software Engineering, Lean Management, Agile management, Scrum, Kanban, ITIL, Critical Chain Project Management and the list just keeps growing.
What is astonishing about this is that new methods are evangelised and adopted without a clear reason for why the older methods are not chosen. Naturally, most engineers and IT specialists almost always breathe a sigh a relief whenever a newer method is introduced. The reason for this, I speculate, is that anything other than traditional ‘time, cost and quality’ control type of project management always brings a sigh of relief.
Another conjecture one can put forward is that, newer project management methods are not only less bloated (and thus simpler to follow), but they also increasingly encourage empirical or fact-based planning. There is a clear predilection for non-teleological and dynamic processes that allow for a project management form of the scientific method. What works (during project execution) is what becomes the plan (i.e. a posteriori planning). What was planned (a priori planning) never works. Any a priori plan is a bad plan, because it tends to be unresponsive to or ignorant of empirical events that occur during a project (even if takes into account the history of past similar projects).
The problem though, is that despite promises made by the various modern project management approaches, it is evident that they have not empirically proven that any of the older methods of traditional project management (TPM) that involve ‘time, cost, and quality’ control are defective.
It is clear that the reason for the proliferation of the various alternative modern methods for project management, in the first place, is driven by inherently unemperical approaches. Project managers and project leaders tend to choose whichever method they feel comfortable with.
Another way of painting the bleak picture of the current state of the project management discipline is that there currently exists no systematic way to judge if a project management method is good or bad.
Empiricism is one of the most obvious systems to use for judging real from unreal, truth from untruth, and what works from what doesn’t work. But, there may be other simpler ways, other heuristics, one could use to judge if a project management method is working or not. Whatever one does, it is easier to find a criteria for judging if something is acceptable in the first place, than to blindly just adopt or do something, that may later prove to be defective. This may explain the current dizziness in the project management space around the various approaches to project management. There are likely about 30 different project management approaches out there, and each of them probably has the same number (or more) of accessible tools. At the end of the day, the project management discipline is extremely chaotic, and it is not clear whether and if this chaotic storm will clear any time soon.
The PMdA project aims to highlight some of these heuristics and employs the use of empiricism for judging which approaches in project management work, and which do not.
The PMdA project’s goal is to look at empirical project studies, analyse current project management methods through the lessons or results observed from those studies, and to propose a project management method that can address modern challenges (such as project bloat, project waste and increasing levels in complexity and unpredictability) in modern project management.
