The Practicing IT Project Manager

When You’re a Jet You’re a Jet all the Way — Software as a Change Agent for Professional Development

Earlier in the week Dave Gordon at his blog responded to my post on data normalization and rightly introduced the need for data rationalization.  I had omitted the last concept in my own post, but strongly implied that the two were closely aligned in my broad definition of normalization beyond the boundaries of eliminating redundancies.  In the end in thinking about this, I prefer Dave’s dichotomy because it more clearly defines what we are doing.

Later in the week I found myself elaborating on these issues in discussions with customers and other professionals in the project management discipline.  In the projects in which I am involved, what I have found is that the process of normalizing and rationalizing data, even historical data which, contrary to Dave’s assertion can be maintained–at least in my business–acts as a change agent in defining the agnostic characteristics what defines the type of data being normalized and rationalized.

What I mean here is that, for instance, a time-phased CPM schedule that eventually becomes an integrated master schedule has an analogue.  For years we have been told, mostly by marketing types working for software manufacturers, that there is a secret sauce that they provide that cannot be reconciled against their competitors.  As a result, entire professional organizations, conferences, white papers, and presentations have been given to prove this assertion.  When looking at the data, however, the assertion is invalid.

The key differentiator between CPM scheduling applications is the optimization engine.  That is the secret sauce and the black box where the valuable IP lies.  It is the algorithms in the optimization that identifies for us those schedule activities that are on the critical and near critical paths.  But when you run these engines side by side on the same schedule, their results are well within one standard deviation of one another.

Keep in mind that I’m talking about differences in data related to normalization and rationalization and whether these differences can be reconciled.  There are other differences in features between the applications that do make a difference in their use and functionality: whether they can lock down a baseline, manage multiple baselines, prevent future work from being planned and executed in the past (yes, this happens), handle hammocks, scale properly, etc.  Because of these functional differences the same data may have been given a different value in the table or the file.  As Dave Gordon rightly points out, reconciling what on the surface are irreconcilable values requires specialized knowledge.  Well, if you have that specialized knowledge then you can achieve what otherwise seems impossible.  Once you achieve this “impossible” feat, it quickly becomes apparent that the features and functions involved are based on a very limited number of values that are common across CPM scheduling applications.

This should not be surprising for those of you out there that have been doing this a long time.  Back in the 1980s we would use visual display boards to map out short segments of the schedule.  We would manually construct schedules in very rudimentary (by today’s standards) mainframe computers and get very long dot matrix representations of the schedule to tape to the “War Room” walls.  The resources, risks, etc. had to be drawn on the schedule.  This manual process required an understanding of CPM schedule construction similar to someone still using long division today.  There was actually a time when people had to memorize their log and square root tables.  it was not very efficient, but the deep understanding of the analogue schedule has since been lost with the introduction of new technology.  This came to mind when I saw on LinkedIn a question of the types of questions that should be asked of a master scheduler in an interview.

As a result of new technology, schedulers aligned themselves into camps based on the application they selected or was selected for them in their job.  Over time I have seen brand loyalty turn into partisanship.  Once again, this should not be surprising.  If you spent ten years of your career on a very popular scheduling application, anything that may undermine one’s investment in that choice–and which makes employment possible–will be deemed as a threat.

I first came upon this behavior years ago when I was serving as CIO for a project management organization.  Some PMOs could not share information–not even e-mail and documents–because most were using PCs and some were using Macs.  Problem was that the key PMO was using Mac.  This was before Microsoft and Apple got together and solved this for us.  Needless to say this undermined organizational effectiveness.  My attempt to get everyone on the same page in terms of operating system compatibility sparked a significant backlash.  Luckily for me Microsoft soon introduced its first solution to address this issue.  So, in the end, the “Macintites”, as we good naturedly called them, could use their Macs for business common to other parts of the organization.

This almost cultish behavior finds itself in new places today: in the iPhone and Droid wars, in the use of Agile, and among CPM scheduling application partisans.  It is true that those of us in the software industry certainly want to see brand loyalty.  It is one of the key measures of success in proving the product’s value and effectiveness.  But it need not undermine the fact that a scheduler is a key specialist in the project management discipline.  If you are a Jet, you don’t need to be a Jet all the way.

Since creating generic analogues of schedules from submitted third-party data, I have found that insights into project performance can be noted that previously were not available.  The power of digitization along with normalization and rationalization allows the data to be effectively integrated at the proper point of intersection with other dimensions of project performance such as cost performance and risk.  Freed from the shackles of having to learn the specific idiosyncrasies of particular applications, the deep understanding of scheduling is being reintroduced.  This is a long time in coming.

The Times They Are A-Changin’–Should PMI Be a Project Management Authority?

Back from a pretty intense three weeks taking care of customers (yes–I have those) and attending professional meetings and conferences.  Some interesting developments regarding the latter that I will be writing about here, but while I was in transit I did have the opportunity to keep up with some interesting discussions within the project management community.

Central among those was an article by Anonymous on PM Hut that appeared a few weeks ago that posited the opinion that PMI Should No Longer Be an Authority on Project Management.  I don’t know why the author of the post decided that they had to remain anonymous.  I learned some time ago that one should not only state their opinion in as forceful terms as possible (backed up with facts), but to own that opinion and be open to the possibility that it could be wrong or require modification.  As stated previously in my posts, project management in any form is not received wisdom.

The author of the post makes several assertions summarized below:

a. That PMI, though ostensibly a not-for-profit organization, behaves as a for-profit organization, and aggressively so.

b.  The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) fails in its goal of being the definitive source for project management because it lacks continuity between versions, its prescriptions lack realism, and, particularly in regard to software project management, that this section has morphed into a hybrid of Waterfall and Agile methodology.

c.  The PMI certifications lack credibility and seem to be geared to what will sell, as opposed to what can be established as a bonafide discipline.

I would have preferred that the author had provided more concrete examples of these assertions, given their severity.  For example, going to the on-line financial statements of the organization, PMI does have a significant staff of paid personnel and directors, with total assets as of 2012 of over $300M.  Of this, about $267M is in investments.  It’s total revenue that year was $173M.  It spent only $115M from its cashflow on its programs and another $4M on governance and executive management compensation.  Thus, it would appear that the non-profit basis of the organization has significantly deviated from its origins at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Project management is indeed big business with vesting and compensation of over $1M going to the President & CEO of the organization in 2012 alone.  Thus there does seem to be more than a little justification for the first of the author’s criticisms.

I also share in the author’s other concerns, but a complete analysis is not available regarding either the true value of the PMBOK® and the value of a PMP certification.  I have met many colleagues who felt the need to obtain the latter, despite their significant practical achievements and academic credentials.  I have also met quite a few people with “PMP” after their names whose expertise is questionable, at best.  I am reminded of the certifications given by PMI and other PM organizations today to a very similar condition several years ago when the gold standard of credentials in certain parts of the IT profession were the Certified Novell Engineer (CNE), and Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) certifications.  They still exist in some form.  What was apparent as I took the courses and the examinations was that the majority of my fellow students had never set up a network.  They were, to use the pejorative among the more experienced members among us, “Paper CNEs and MCSEs.”  In interviewing personnel with “PMP” after their name I find a wide variation in expertise, thus the quality of experience with supporting education tends to have more influence with me than some credential from one of the PM organizations.

Related to this larger issue of what constitutes a proper credential in our discipline, I came across an announcement by Dave Gordon at his The Practicing IT Project Manager blog of a Project Management Job Requirements study.  Dave references this study by Noel Radley of SoftwareAdvise.com that states that the PMP is preferred or specified by 79% of the 300 jobs used as the representative baseline for the industries studied.  Interestingly, the study showed that advanced education is rarely required or preferred.

I suspect that this correlates in a negative way with many of the results that we have seen in the project management community.  Basic economics dictates that people with advanced degrees (M.A. and M.B.A. grads) do come with a higher price than those who only have Baccalaureate degrees, their incomes rising much more than 4 year college grads.  It seems that businesses do not value that additional investment except by exception.

Additionally, I have seen the results of two studies presented in government forums over the past six months (but alas no links yet) where the biggest risk to the project was identified to be the project manager.  Combined with the consistent failure reported by widely disparate sources of the overwhelming majority of projects to perform within budget and be delivered on time raises the natural question as to whether those that we choose to be project managers have the essential background to perform the job.

There seems to be a widely held myth that formal education is somehow unnecessary to develop a project manager–relegating what at least masquerades as a “profession”–to the level of a technician or mechanic.  It is not that we do not need technicians or mechanics, it is that higher level skills are needed to be a successful project manager.

This myth seems to be spreading, and to have originated from the society as a whole, where the emphasis is on basic skills, constant testing, the elimination of higher level thinking, and a narrowing of the curriculum.  Furthermore, college education, which was widely available to post-World War II generations well into the 1980s, is quickly becoming unaffordable by a larger segment of the population.  Thus, what we are seeing is a significant skills gap in the project management discipline to add to one that already has had an adverse impact on the ability of both government and industry to succeed.  For example, a paper from Calleam Consulting Ltd in a paper entitled “The Story Behind the High Failure Rates in the IT Sector” found that “17 percent of large IT projects go so badly that they can threaten the very existence of the company.”

From my experiences over the last 30+ years, when looking for a good CTO or CIO I will look to practical and technical experience and expertise with the ability to work with a team.  For an outstanding coder I look for a commitment to achieve results and elegance in the final product.  But for a good PM give me someone with a good liberal arts education with some graduate level business or systems work combined with leadership.  Leadership includes all of the positive traits one demands of this ability: honesty, integrity, ethical behavior, effective personnel management, commitment, and vision.

The wave of the future in developing our expertise in project management will be the ability to look at all of the performance characteristics of the project and its place in the organization.  This is what I see as the real meaning of “Integrated Project Management.”  I have attended several events since the beginning of the year focused on the project management discipline in which assertions were made that “EVM is the basis for integrated project management” or “risk is the basis for integrated project management” or “schedule is the basis for integrated project management.”  The speakers did not seem to acknowledge that the specialty that they were addressing is but one aspect of measuring project performance, and even less of a factor in measuring program performance.

I believe that this is a symptom of excess specialization and lack of a truly professional standard in project management.  I believe that if we continue to hire technicians with expertise in one area, possessing a general certification that simply requires one to attend conferences and sit in courses that lack educational accreditation and claim credit for “working within” a project, we will find that making the transition to the next evolutionary step at the PM level will be increasingly difficult.  Finally, for the anonymous author critical of PMI it seems that project management is a good business for those who make up credentials but not such a good deal for those with a financial stake in project management.

Note:  This post has been modified to correct minor grammatical and spelling errors.

Full disclosure:  The author has been a member of PMI for almost 20 years, and is a current member and former board member of the College of Performance Management (CPM).