Takin’ Care of Business — Information Economics in Project Management

Neoclassical economics abhors inefficiency, and yet inefficiencies exist.  Among the core issues that create inefficiencies is the asymmetrical nature of information.  Asymmetry is an accepted cornerstone of economics that leads to inefficiency.  We can see in our daily lives and employment the effects of one party in a transaction having more information than the other:  knowing whether the used car you are buying is a lemon, measuring risk in the purchase of an investment and, apropos to this post, identifying how our information systems allow us to manage complex projects.

Regarding this last proposition we can peel this onion down through its various levels: the asymmetry in the information between the customer and the supplier, the asymmetry in information between the board and stockholders, the asymmetry in information between management and labor, the asymmetry in information between individual SMEs and the project team, etc.–it’s elephants all the way down.

This asymmetry, which drives inefficiency, is exacerbated in markets that are dominated by monopoly, monopsony, and oligopoly power.  When informed by the work of Hart and Holmström regarding contract theory, which recently garnered the Nobel in economics, we have a basis for understanding the internal dynamics of projects in seeking efficiency and productivity.  What is interesting about contract theory is that it incorporates the concept of asymmetrical information (labeled as adverse selection), but expands this concept in human transactions at the microeconomic level to include considerations of moral hazard and the utility of signalling.

The state of asymmetry and inefficiency is exacerbated by the patchwork quilt of “tools”–software applications that are designed to address only a very restricted portion of the total contract and project management system–that are currently deployed as the state of the art.  These tend to require the insertion of a new class of SME to manage data by essentially reversing the efficiencies in automation, involving direct effort to reconcile differences in data from differing tools. This is a sub-optimized system.  It discourages optimization of information across the project, reinforces asymmetry, and is economically and practically unsustainable.

The key in all of this is ensuring that sub-optimal behavior is discouraged, and that those activities and behaviors that are supportive of more transparent sharing of information and, therefore, contribute to greater efficiency and productivity are rewarded.  It should be noted that more transparent organizations tend to be more sustainable, healthier, and with a higher degree of employee commitment.

The path forward where there is monopsony power, where there is a dominant buyer, is to impose the conditions for normative behavior that would otherwise be leveraged through practice in a more open market.  For open markets not dominated by one player as either supplier or seller, instituting practices that reward behavior that reduces the effects of asymmetrical information, and contracting disincentives in business transactions on the open market is the key.

In the information management market as a whole the trends that are working against asymmetry and inefficiency involve the reduction of data streams, the construction of cross-domain data repositories (or reservoirs) that allow for the satisfaction of multiple business stakeholders, and the introduction of systems that are more open and adaptable to the needs of the project system in lieu of a limited portion of the project team.  These solutions exist, yet their adoption is hindered because of the long-term infrastructure that is put in place in complex project management.  This infrastructure is supported by incumbents that are reinforcing to the status quo.  Because of this, from the time a market innovation is introduced to the time that it is adopted in project-focused organizations usually involves the expenditure of several years.

This argues for establishing an environment that is more nimble.  This involves the adoption of a series of approaches to achieve the goals of broader information symmetry and efficiency in the project organization.  These are:

a. Instituting contractual relationships, both internally and externally, that encourage project personnel to identify risk.  This would include incentives to kill efforts that have breached their framing assumptions, or to consolidate progress that the project has achieved to date–sending it as it is to production–while killing further effort that would breach framing assumptions.

b. Institute policy and incentives on the data supply end to reduce the number of data streams.  Toward this end both acquisition and contracting practices should move to discourage proprietary data dead ends by encouraging normalized and rationalized data schemas that describe the environment using a common or, at least, compatible lexicon.  This reduces the inefficiency derived from opaqueness as it relates to software and data.

c.  Institute policy and incentives on the data consumer end to leverage the economies derived from the increased computing power from Moore’s Law by scaling data to construct interrelated datasets across multiple domains that will provide a more cohesive and expansive view of project performance.  This involves the warehousing of data into a common repository or reduced set of repositories.  The goal is to satisfy multiple project stakeholders from multiple domains using as few streams as necessary and encourage KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases).  This reduces the inefficiency derived from data opaqueness, but also from the traditional line-and-staff organization that has tended to stovepipe expertise and information.

d.  Institute acquisition and market incentives that encourage software manufacturers to engage in positive signalling behavior that reduces the opaqueness of the solutions being offered to the marketplace.

In summary, the current state of project data is one that is characterized by “best-of-breed” patchwork quilt solutions that tend to increase direct labor, reduces and limits productivity, and drives up cost.  At the end of the day the ability of the project to handle risk and adapt to technical challenges rests on the reliability and efficiency of its information systems.  A patchwork system fails to meet the needs of the organization as a whole and at the end of the day is not “takin’ care of business.”