Fractals and Management

In project management the theory is that we have some bad projects, but that in the main most projects are well run, on time, and on budget in all companies. In fact it's not even true for most companies. Why is that?

The project management discipline has been, in its modern critical path guise, around for over 50 years. So practice of that age should now be delivering repeatable and predictable results. The usual advice given to people on how to acquire a skill is: practice, practice, practice. Well we've been practicing project management for decades and yet we seem to be no better at it. Of course the unwritten assumption in the skill acquisition adage is that you're practicing the right thing!

If so many companies have problem projects then the question has to be why? The usual approach to answering this question is to conduct lessons learned sessions and then change procedures to ensure that it doesn't happen again. And yet it does! No amount of fiddling with methods, tools, or procedures seems to make things better.

Benoit Mandelbrot, Nobel Prize winner, developed the concept of fractal geometry. One of whose points is that as you magnify a given shape you see the same shape, and as you increase the magnification you see the same shape again.

So what as this to do with projects?

Well maybe it's not just the projects that are troubled. Look at the management level above the projects. Are they troubled? And are the layers of management above them also troubled. Like the fractal under the highest magnification maybe they are images of the layers above them. Projects will reflect the behaviors of the management system within which they exist. If top management is reactive and panicky then all the layers below them will exhibit the same attributes.

Bad management must be a systemic issue because if it weren't then good management would have exercised the practices from the body corporate.

So if you see a number of troubled projects don't just look at the individual projects, also look at the management milieu that they exist in. Look at he management chain and if you see fractals then you know you have a serious problem.

PM and the Narrative

One of the key skills in politics is the ability to control the narrative. In other words how to control the story that is being told and understood about a particular issue. Whether it be Immigration, Syria, Financial reform, Climate change, politicians and other players in these issues are always striving to frame the issue in a way that is favorable to their agenda.

A classic example is the narrative told about the defeat of the German Army in WW1. According to the Nazi's the army was never defeated. Yet the true story was that at the end of 1918 they had been handed a series of defeats by the British, French, and American armies. They were in full retreat and their leaders were asking for an armistice. But that narrative was rarely heard in Germany. It was one of the enabling myths that led to the rise of Hitler and WW2.

The same skill is essential for project managers when it comes to how their project will be viewed within the company. For if you don't portray the correct story about your project others, your opponents will describe it in their terms. They will seize on any slippage in schedule or increase in budget to portray your project, and by association you, as a failure. Office gossip can tarnish your project. Remember that in the political sphere perception is everything. Recovering the situation once the narrative turns negative is very difficult.

The only way to avoid an erroneous opinion of your project is to make sure that you are constantly out there preaching the value of your project and the success it has achieved so far. In addition make sure that your team is also sending out the same message. Loose lips sink projects, to paraphrase a famous WW2 slogan. There is always someone on every project who loves recounting the latest setback in catastrophic terms. They use adjectives with careless abandon and paint everything in lurid tones. Find these people and sit in them. Start every team meeting with a brief recital of the benefits of the project and how much progress has been achieved. It is easy to get tied up in the toils of daily problems and forget the primary purpose of the project. It our job to make sure that doesn't happen.

Every situation has a narrative. You can rest assured that if you don't write it then someone else will, to your detriment. 

Potemkin lives on.

Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, had a minister Gregory Potemkin who she had put in charge of incorporating the newly acquired territory of the Crimea into the empire. When she made a tour of inspection in 1787 the wily minister is reputed to have erected villages with just the facade of buildings but no depth. Just canvas and wood exteriors. At night lights were lit in the distance to give the image of more settlements than there really were.

Now historians are divided as to whether it actually happened and if it did that the Empress was fooled. Catherine was not reputed to be foolish. Some believe she was in on the scheme as she wished to deceive the emissaries of foreign powers who attended her court on the progress of the area under Russian rule. So we enter the realm of did she know, if she did, did it serve her purpose to go along with the pretense?

So what is the relevance of this piece of history? Well the concept of the Potemkin village is used widely in corporations today. But instead of canvas and wood we have spreadsheets, corporate reporting, financial modeling tools. All of them are used to create an illusion of the state of the enterprise that is at best a simplified representation of reality and at worst is borderline fraud.

One example is the VaR (Value at Risk) model used by financial companies to calculate how much risk they faced if the market in their securities went sour. Lehman Brothers reported on the Friday that they had a risk of $95 million. On the following Monday they were bankrupt with losses in the billions. Bear Sterns model said $35million before they went pear shaped with hundreds of millions in losses. Oops.

A less dramatic example than this was recounted to me recently by a friend. They were answering a spreadsheet on the state of their Disaster Recovery plan. So following the precept that you only answer the questions you are asked they have an excellent DR configuration, some blotches, but perfection makes auditors suspicious. The reality is that their DR system has only three disc drives, which cannot be used in parallel, and the best part of 150 tapes to recover, firstly from the off site storage facility and then to DR computers. At least 80 hours of recovery work. Their recovery target is 24 hours. Oops.

But if the unthinkable happens the management will point to the reports and say, "how were we to know? We trusted our technical people".  Glossing over the fact that they did know, they just didn't want it spelt out in terms that would have demanded that they take action and spend the money to fix it. Gregory Potemkin lives on in the form of the Potemkin spreadsheet. And, as in his time, we have to ask the question who is in on the deceit?

Is this important to project managers? Yes it is. Because you need to know that any spreadsheet you are given is only as good as the information in it. You need to know what is the purpose of the tool, where it gets its information from, and who is reading it? From a political rather than an ethical viewpoint you need to answer the question "Do the recipients really want to know the true state of the situation, or are they happy in their ignorance?" More messengers are shot than are bedecked with garlands. Your wife may have a large posterior but you'll get no praise for telling her so; even if she asks you, 'Do I look fat in this?" Know your recipient and act accordingly.

Silos and Bottlenecks – The continuation

 At the end of the previous posting “Let us speak of Bottlenecks and Silos” I predicted the following:

I'm awaiting the leadership response.  Which I suspect will be of the "you need to work smarter rather than harder" variety all the while studiously ignoring the fact that is they who need to get smarter.

Well I was wrong. The powers that be have decided that we need to just work harder. Mandatory overtime is now in force for our business analysts and that will help us create more requirements documents that will further overload our development team. We basically just stuffed more work into the bottleneck.

Also we have to work on all our projects even those with a priority of 70. Management has abdicated their responsibility to prioritize work load and just said, “work ‘em all!”

Apparently they have failed to grasp Einstein’s definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Well at least they didn’t ask us to work smarter, just to act dumber.

Project Managers: How to Oppose

One of the key political skills is knowing when and how to voice opposition to a managerial decision. A misstep here can cause you to lose your side of the argument for good, and with it any possible wriggle room on interpreting the decision, and also be a major career mistake.

This week I was in a meeting where two groups were discussing how to combine their activities. One group is having to adjust to the inclusion of the other team's project managers into their long standing processes and projects. Senior management had decided that the first group’s projects lacked sufficient management rigor. They were more right than they knew, rigor was missing not only from the projects but also from the executives that launched and prioritized them. But more on that subject in a future posting

The change had been in place for some weeks but the integration was spotty with the usual foot dragging and half-hearted cooperation, but no overt opposition. The classic guerrilla warfare strategy aimed at wearing down the invaders with minor delays and obstacles. That was until this meeting when one of the managers in the first group decided to voice her opinion that the change was unnecessary and she didn't see the need to implement it. So far so good, from her viewpoint, she'd stated her opposition and since it was a view that others shared no serious damage had been done. Honest opinions are always welcome.

But knowing when enough is enough was not in this individual's skill set. She kept on arguing her point of view in a vigorous and forthright manner. She wouldn't allow others, including her boss, to finish their comments. She just steamrollered right over them. When my boss tried to intervene she received the same treatment.

The net result was that the vague guidelines that had been in place prior to the meeting will now become more explicit; should will be replaced by shall and all wriggle room and obstacles will be swept away.

The overt opposition resulted in the opposite outcome to that intended. The invaders were not repulsed, far from it as they were now securely ensconced in the heart of the process and opposition to them will be frowned upon.

As far as the individual is concerned she not only embarrassed her boss in a public meeting, she also lost the support of her peers. Even those who in general agreed with her arguments were appalled at her strident behavior. Her ability to influence future events has been negated and she's going to have a career counseling session with her boss – never a good outcome.

How should she have proceeded?

Well keeping quiet once her boss failed to support her would have been a good start. Never raising the issue in such an open forum would also have been a smarter move. Unless you know you have the votes or the backing of the decision makers then raising controversial issues in public is never a clever move. She should have worked on her boss in private and got his concurrence with the delays and interpretations. Covert opposition was the way to go.

Opposing senior management decisions requires a very careful analysis of the political environment and an appreciation of what is possible and practical. Sometimes ambiguous instructions that allow you to interpret them in your favor are preferable to outright opposition that leads to the codifying of the rules you don't agree with. If you believe that you can't live with ambiguity then make sure that you can live with the clarifications you seek.  Always be careful what you wish for.

   

Types of Bosses: The Cheerleader

There is a particular type of manager who only sees the positive side of company policy.  Like Dr. Pangloss they assume that what is happening is the best that can be done in the best of company's. They appear to be able to believe ten impossible things before breakfast.

Now for an old hand like myself they are either unbelievably naive or apparatchiks of the most mindless sort. Experience indicates that the latter is true. Nobody can be that naive!

If you have a problem recognizing this managerial species then you will fail as a politician.  The female version sounds like a kindergarten teacher always warning against running with scissors, while the male version has more enthusiasm for an obscure change in purchasing rules than any rational person should have.

Now although they may be the butt of jokes from the more worldly members of their teams they should not be underestimated. Their sugarcoated personas can hide a very ruthless streak. When challenged they react badly. Anyone who challenges their delusions is deemed as not being a team player. The upmost crime in their world. And once you are condemned of that deviancy you are in trouble.

So how do you handle this type? Well you just pay lip service to their enthusiasm. Politicians are accused of having too many faces and they practice this because they need to work with many people to build alliances. You can't disagree with everyone all the time and still get things done. So if the manager has this personality then just humor her.

However if you work for a company were the management culture is more akin to a cult, with daily cheerleading sessions, typically they are American, Europeans being too cynical and buttoned down for silly games, then you have a decision to make. You can either sign up or you can move on. A lot of companies with this ethos have terrible working conditions and see regular and extensive overtime as being a sign of loyalty. Commitment to the team is everything!

Also don't mistake enthusiasm for commitment to doing things. One of my first experiences of this behavior was on a trip to the US where I attended a weekly production meeting and at the end they had a "lets do it" ritual. Which was strange to me coming from the UK where meetings typically end on a low note, chairs pushed back, participants shuffling out as if burdened by the extra workload.  The problem was that they didn't, do it that is. The next week the only person who's finished his assigned tasks was me. The cynical Brit. The others had excuses, but still did the "lets do it" ritual at the end of that and every subsequent meeting. I reached the conclusion that "let's do it" was the same as "mañana" but without its overwhelming sense of urgency.