Being cynical is part of being a Program Manager and even more so for a good Program Planning and Controls manager.It simply comes with the territory.
When someone tells you something about the program, like "oh yea I've got all those Work Packages sequenced so we can meet the Critical Design Review (CDR) date," my first impulse is "sure, let me ask a few questions."
- Do you have sufficient schedule margin for the programmatic risk aspects of those work packages?
- How about those pesky technical performance measures? Got any idea how you're doing on staying inside the performance bands on your design parameters?
- How about those annoying upstream dependencies from systems engineering, got that covered in your subsystem spec in time for the draft release to the customer 60 prior to CDR?
Things like that are what we work every week.
So now comes along the project management software vendor, with a message of hope and prosperity for all us PMs. Now I am personal friends with many product managers for these products and even a President of a project management product firm. That's not the issue.
The issue is all but a few of these product firms actually manage projects or programs for a living prior to their role as a product supplier. My one shining example is a product and it's leader who was a PEO (Program Executive Officer) in the US Navy, who "managed" several aircraft upgrades to the fleet in his service career.
Others have long careers in Project Management software product sales. Some are experienced in the politics of this industry. Many are just "good salesman," for which I have the up most respect.
So Where's the Rub?
As Will says:
To sleep - perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.
There's always a "rub." In these cases the "rub" is in many cases it's a "push" sale. "Here, look at my cleaver tool, see isn't it cleaver and how exactly is it you manage program?"
So one of my first questions - especially during trade shows - is "tell me about how your tool is used on a specific program to increase the probability of that program's success?" This notion of "probability of program success (PoPS)" is concept adopted by the US DoD and flowed down to the services.
Everyone in that domain knows that program success is a probabilistic process. Every variable in a status report, every variable in a planning document, a basis of estimate -everything is a random variable. Drawn from an underlying probability distribution, that may be known or unknown.
This is the rub
All work is probabilistic. So if your tool does not acknowledge that in some way, have the ability to deal with that, process those probabilistic values as part of its normal course of work - then the only strategy you left with for increasing the probability of success is HOPE. And Hope is not a Strategy.
So when you're at the trade show, or watching the pod cast of the vendors product, or reading the marketing literature ask yourself these questions:
- Is what they're trying to sell me an answer to my real problem?
- Does the vendor understand the real problems of project management?
- Is their demonstrated evidence that this product increases the probability of success?
- If so can I hear how this happened?
- And most important can that success be applied to me domain and context?
We get very few positive answers - a few, but not many. That's the source of cynicism. Vendors don't manage programs. Their message is a sales message, cleverly wrapped around marketing hype.
So Here's Some Advice
The source of this advice came from a very crusty senior warrant officer circa 1970, South Vietnam. He was the maintenance officer for our fleet of aircraft. I was assigned for a short time to his shop to "learn" the problems of mission planning from the inside.
Mission availability was the unit of measure. "How many aircraft are ready for tomorrows mission?"
The answer had better be "enough to fly the mission and enough spares when they fail to depart on time." But we some times answered - as young naive officers - "well sir, we're working real hard to get ready for tomorrow."
His advice was:
BOYS, (and he meant boys not men) NEVER CONFUSE EFFORT WITH RESULTS, WHEN ARE THESE PIGS GONNA FLY?
My version of his advice is:
NEVER CONFUSE PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOLS, WITH PROJECT MANAGEMENT, WHEN ARE WE GOING TO ARRIVE AT "DONE"?
