Run, don’t walk (or crawl)!

Yeah, I know, it should be the other way around; but often it is not.  Why people or companies try to start any endeavour directly at the top instead of progressing from their current level evades me.  In project management you often see this with PMOs or Enterprise Project Management (EPM).

Enterprises get into a mad rush to create one or many PMOs when, up to that moment, they had never thought of actually managing projects or of having any type of processes however simple.  Suddenly an Encyclopaedia Britannica sized manual lands on your desk and every newly christened PM must abide by all of its teachings.  The reality is that typically these new processes are ill formed, ill fitting, and bypassed as much as possible.  Of course processes evolve on a weekly basis. 

The PMO craze has been going on for years now and in many organizations is in its Nth incarnation.  PMOs are not useless unless you design them to be that way.

EPM is the newer craze but in many regards follow the same path as PMOs.  I know of an organization where, up to very recently, no schedules where ever prepared yet they have gone whole hog on EPM.  You have to prepare a schedule, upload it, and maintain it.  Simple, no?  Maybe, maybe not:

• You are told not to put too many tasks in your schedule (nothing below deliverables).  When you contradict that edict with a whopping 700 tasks for a 6 month, 10 person project you find out why; the poor server can barely load, save, and publish something that size.  Forget resource levelling; my laptop is more powerful.
• In total contradiction with the prior directive, schedules are treated like a collection of post it notes.  Everything that comes to mind is now required to go into the schedule.
• In total contradiction with the prior directive everything that your sponsor does not want to explain must be taken out of the schedule even if doing so deletes predecessors or successors.  You can always add them later!
• You must stick to the original end date regardless of delays, scope changes, resource shortages, or whatever else happens.
• When you ask for the WBS field to be part of the enterprise template you are asked by the EPM administrator if you mean Work Breakdown Structure.  What else the freaking hell could I mean?  You are then told that you have to wait for a meeting of the steering committee to find out if adding your field will be allowed.  Something tells me that no one on that committee has ever run a project.
• You are told that you need to update a traffic light status based on earned value metrics but promptly find out that none of the EV related fields are visible.  I guess I’m supposed to go to that steering committee for that too.  By the way I found out that the traffic lights are not linked to EV anyway; they are set by hands and there are no guidelines for setting them.  All green anyone?

I guess that, if you insist on jumping off a plainly visible cliff, you may as well run and be out of your misery sooner instead of inching up to it.

What do you think?  As always comments are welcome.

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Comments

[Shim Marom]

So true and yet so mis-understood.

[Patrick Richard]

Shim,

Thanks for the comment. There is also an "history repeats itself" flavor to this don't you think?

[Private Leonard Lawrence]

No white men if I can help it.