Project Managers frequently find themselves working in areas in which they are not experts.  Here in the handbook you shall learn how to predict that the client has failed to find an appropriate person to work with, before it becomes a major problem.  If you ever wondered why you had to work with so many “nice but incompetent”  people (you find out about them in that order), then read on.  But remember that what you learn here you should not speak of, this heady stuff is not for the uninitiated.

Bob works for a company that employs thousands of people all over the world, many of whom are renowned experts in their fields.  The company has problems with its Billing Systems (say) and Bob, himself a senior figure within the Finance team, has been asked to identify the problems, propose a solution and oversee its implementation.  Bob’s mission, though it is of great importance, is doomed to fail because Bob, smart though he is, is a Man Friday.

Man Friday – A person you give a task to simply because you can.

Few companies are mature enough to give Project Management training and devolve budgetary responsibility to department heads.  Without training and with little or no budgetary control, those same department heads will use whatever human resource is available to them, regardless of their suitability for the task at hand.  Given a problem to deal with they will quite simply turn to the nearest (and usually the only) resource, which is why you can find yourself on a multi-million dollar project facing off with the client’s secretary!  In Bob’s case he just happened to be free at the time that the Billing problems became such an issue that someone realised that something had to be done.  The error in the management’s thinking was to derive the equation:

Big Problem + Senior Person = Successful Outcome.

There is no basis in science or precedence for believing this equation to be true.  In fact, what Bob knows about Billing Systems could be written on the back of a postage stamp and the only adage that should have sprung to the minds of the executives who appointed him is: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

That the world is full of people with vast knowledge and experience of billing systems occurs to nobody.  One such person could walk into the company, listen to the problems and write the solution down on a whiteboard in a couple of hours.  In fact, once told how the company operates, an expert would be able to predict all of the problems in the billing process.  Does the company go out and get one of these experts?  No. It uses Bob, a complete Billing newbie.  It will now take much longer and cost the company far more to implement a poor solution than it would have to get a perfect solution and some business process improvements to boot.  This is because Bob will make many mistakes, not least of which will be to follow the first law of Man Friday idiocy:

If you are a Man Friday and don’t know what you are doing then you must perpetuate the mistake by appointing other Man Fridays to help you.

Before you can say tickety-boo, Bob will have surrounded himself with a committee of the equally inept, reporting back to the uninformed, in the misguided belief that the business he works in is some kind of abstract institution that bills its clients in a way that only it can.

Black Arts practitioners, beware of working with a gaggle of collective numbkins, who do not know what they are doing!  In the absence of the ‘expert’, when things do not work, they will blame you.  You will also be deemed responsible for filling in the gaps in their knowledge!  Whatever it is you are managing, always employ the first rule of anti Man Friday idiocy:

There is no business process so complicated that it defies the skill of a single person to define a system to handle it.

Your task is to find that person if it is not you.  Flee from the “group defined” solution delivered to you by Bob and his ilk; it is based on a little knowledge and no experience.  Instead, hunt out the person who will tell you what the root of all the problems is and how to solve them, starting with the root.

Question: how will you recognise said expert?  After all, if in our example you are not a Billing expert yourself, are you not also part of the problem.

Answer: Experts can condense the task at hand or the problem they are solving to a single “thing”.  In our example with Bob, you would look for someone who might say that the one thing in Billing is to start with the contracts.  This indicates a fundamental knowledge of Billing and the person who says this to you quite probably knows what they are talking about.  Bob and co, stumbling about in the dark, won’t start from the root, they will start from the point in the cycle that they know best; in the way that a bathroom salesman, asked to build a house, might ignore its foundations and start with the tiles.  Only when the system cannot be rolled out to countries and business units beyond their ken and some kludge workaround has to be incorporated does their lack of knowledge (and your problem) surface.

To be a Black Arts practitioner you must be a seeker of the one thing. Remove the forest and the trees around you and look for the roots of your task.  For example, mentally reduce all professional services companies to organizations that sell time.  Do not to be distracted by the fancy name they might give to the time that they are selling.  When working for product companies get straight to the heart of who they are by asking what do they make, who buys it and why?  A practitioner will move on to considering how products are made only after understanding why they are bought.  This way they avoid thinking that adding expensive frills to a product that is bought because it is cheap is a good idea.

If you wish to be successful in a domain you and not an expert in then look for the man or woman who can define the essence of the task at hand.  You will know you have found them when they tell you that it all comes down to understanding one thing…

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To hide meaning from the minds of the feeble, practitioners of The Black Arts have been known to rely on cryptography.  Ask anyone who has looked at one of those crazy Gantt charts that need to be wrapped around four walls what any of that stuff means; some of the things that PMs do are quite unintelligible!

The equation above relates to the fact that there is very little in life that benefits from the addition of politics.  P + X will usually give X-, or in other words, if you add a political dimension to any endeavour the end result is invariably damaging to said endeavour.  Think about the addition of politics to sport, religion or industry and you start to get the picture.  What we are about to look at is a deliberate warping of the environment so that we can achieve a minor miracle, where P + X gives X+.

Black Art practitioners are no mere mortals who struggle to wield the power of politics in an effective direction and so end up damaging their cause.  Here we shall reveal their most closely held secret: to be good at politics so that you can use it as an effective tool, you only need to know what politics is.  Politics, as defined by master practitioners:

Politics: The art of war against another individual or group of individuals without the open declaration of hostilities and preferably under the banner of peace and friendship.

Now that we are clear on what the objective is we can work out how to achieve it.  There are 3 simple stages to winning the political battle…

Stage 1 – Prepare

The uninitiated think that this means having all of the project documentation to hand and mastery of facts like the number of change requests since scope was first determined and the extent of the cost overruns. This is information for weaklings; of course we don’t expect you to be counting your ammunition in the face of your foe! By prepare, we mean spend a lot of time telling everyone that you are a straight-talker who is not interested in politics, only in achieving the goals that were clearly set at the start of the project. Build a reputation for detesting politics. It’s not hard, you just have to say it enough times and people will start to believe you even though it is a downright lie.

Stage 2 – Deliver

This is where all your preparation will prove its value.  Begin all your politically sensitive statements with words along the lines of: “as you know, I’m not into politics…” Remember too that this is the most politically explosive statement to be on the receiving end of.  Basically it translates into “I am about to pull this trigger right in your face but I am innocent of any crime because I know no better”.  Once you have delivered this jaw-dropping lie make your statement and brazen it out.  No matter what banana skins your ‘opponents’ might strew in your path keep reciting the mantra and rebutting their statements with comments like “well, that all seems very politically motivated…”.

Stage 3 – Retreat

Many an inexperienced practitioner falls down at this next stage because they cannot resist the temptation to wallow in victory.  Remember, your opponents are not passive, give them time and they will work out how to defeat you.  The secret of success is to have both the problem and the solution that you want in your possession.  Lay them on the table as the non-political option and then defeat any attempt to move to a different option by creating work for your opponents as a condition of movement on your part.  You will want to have such lines to hand as “well, I suppose that could be considered if you would care to document your requirements for us all to consider”.  Who, apart from Project Managers, is ever prepared to document anything?  Or, “we could re-scope the project to take that into consideration but you would have to provide us with a written budgetary framework to operate within otherwise it could prove too costly”.  You’ve got them again with “written”!

So, remember politics can be the friend of the Black Arts practitioner, and if you are a Project Manager, that means you need to secretly treat everyone else as the enemy.

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Before we go any further; a warning. You already know the things that are in the Black Arts Handbook, just as you would know about gravity even if you had no word for it.  These things we will tell you about were always there, you just had to open your eyes and ears to see and hear them.

Secret Art #1 : The Power of Numbers

It is a natural human instinct to avoid risk and the way to do that as a Project Manager is to slice, dice and scope your project into manageable chunks.  That is all very well but such activities confer no power on the Project Manager.  At the same time as you chop the project up into tasks and activities you must focus on the big picture, and the one thing about it that confers near magical powers upon you – the number!

If something is worth doing then it is usually because there is a commercial value in doing it.  Many Project Managers ignore this, look instead for some fuzzy, altruistic goal, and therefore lose their place in the big picture and the power that accompanies ‘big picture knowledge’.  Here’s an example of what we mean by the power of the number: when the Development Team Leader wants to block your access to his best DBA you need to be able to slap him over the head with the size of the number you are carrying around in your back pocket.

“This is a $50 million project and you want to put some junior DBA on it?”

See?

Do you see how powerful that statement is?

“You want to jeopardise $50 million” is a far more powerful statement to make to your Team Leader/Director/Manager than “we’re running behind schedule and could really do with some help here”.  Why is this so?  Well, the answer is simple, so simple that as we said right at the start, you already know it.

The “number” is the modern-day equivalent of the King’s Seal.  In the old days Kings would get the Barons to obey their instructions, conveyed by an emissary who might otherwise have found himself headless, simply by giving said emissary the royal seal.  The number, in today’s parlance, is the seal!  Don’t avoid it; rather seek it out, the bigger it is the better it is for those who know its uses.  A big number could only have been generated by, and is the property of, the most powerful people behind the project.  Knowing the number and carrying it around, makes you their emissary and anyone who messes with you messes with them.

Remember to always treat the number as if it is your responsibility to deliver it.  It is yours, the precious… it calls… it promises everything…

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They huddle in a corner, hunched over the Gantt chart you just handed out, muttering darkly.  Only the occasional, quick glance in your direction betrays that you are the subject of their reproach.  You sigh and for a moment are tempted to bat for your corner, but in the end you realise that it’s best to ignore them.  A quick drink after work and they’ll come round.  Instead, you scan through the list of Change Requests, Outstanding Issues, Bug Fixes and the Financial Summary and prepare yourself for your next meeting.  This one ought not to be so bad, the Client might not like what you have to say either but at least they don’t see you as the enemy within.

Who would be a Project Manager?  There are times when it is akin to being a referee at a particularly fractious soccer match.  You have to keep both sides apart while making sure that they play the same game and abide by the rules that they want to wilfully ignore.  Sometimes it feels as if only you realise the fundamental difference; this is not a game, and if one side loses then nobody wins!

The classic portrayal of the gap between requirements and delivery.

We’ve all seen the cartoon about the difference between what the Customer wanted and what they got and we all know who has to manage the gap. What the team on both sides of the requirements/delivery divide should acknowledge is that this situation does not exist only as a comic creation, it exists as inevitable outcome of the fact that requirements evolve from abstract needs but Software Developers can only build still life.  If this was honestly stated by all parties right from the outset then the first question that would be asked is who is going to make sure that we all walk away from this with a satisfactory outcome in the bag?  The notion of the Project Manager as the Client’s mole or the Supplier’s secret salesperson would evaporate.

One of the most irritating debates would also get put to bed; namely why the Client should pay for Project Management.  The client should pay because the Project Manager serves the project, not the Client nor his or her direct employer, who only employs Project Managers because they have long experience and understand the necessity of Project Management.  A Project Manager is a necessary part of the cost of delivery.

Fortunately we live in a world where the value of a good Project Manager can be proved beyond doubt, provided he or she tracks everything related to the “infamous gap“; issues, changing requirements, moving time lines etc., and stays on top of it.  Our Project Manager can walk into a meeting with the Client or Delivery Team, and the data at their command rams home their value to either side.  Wait a minute, either side?  Maybe Project Managers are the enemy within after all.

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The issue is one of risk and who takes it. With a fixed price project the risk is deemed to be the supplier’s, with T&M it is the customer who takes the risk. This ‘risk’ is presumed to be the risk of overrun, in other words if the project is not completed on time the cost of resources to continue working on it will be borne by one party or the other.

In the fixed price scenario, the supplier is in theory happy to accept the risk because it is the supplier who names the price and sets the timeline. If the project comes in early then the supplier makes a super profit because the engagement was profitable even if it was only on time and the supplier is usually allowed to add a mark-up to the project for accepting fixed price risk in the first place.  Everybody is happy unless the project comes in so late that it eats into the supplier’s contingency and extra margin, but if that should happen it is the supplier’s fault anyway for getting it so wrong in the first place. Or is it?

In reality the supplier rarely sets the price or the timeline. Customers don’t just sit back and accept the estimates they are given, they negotiate and they usually negotiate the fixed price risk factor away. Suppliers need the business and recognise that if they don’t do it their competitors will, so they take the risk of a fixed price project scoped out to meet exact deadlines. However, if they fail to meet those deadlines they do not passively accept the cost of the overrun either. Even if it is entirely their fault, suppliers will do their utmost to stay in business and running unprofitable projects is not a good way to remain solvent. They will under-deliver on what was promised, scale back on resources allocated to the project, either by using less or cheaper labour, and they will hit back with that dreaded weapon, the Change Request. When the arguments start over the Change Requests then nobody wins.

If we look at what was intended rather than the means of getting and paying for it we might be able to see a way out of the problem. Customers want good, reliable software that addresses a need that they have. However suppliers cannot give customers what they want; they can only give them what they ask for.  Customers, not being experts in the software development business frequently don’t know how to ask for what they want. Sometimes they do not even know if it is possible to get it. If you know that there is a gap between what the customer asks for and what they want, and you have enough experience to know that they rarely like what they are given first time, then the solution is to show them what they are going to get, early.

Project Managers should try to minimize the size of the gap by making sure that as far as possible the customer sees what they are going to get as soon as possible, in small chunks. The sooner the “what you want” vs “what you get” battle is fought, the sooner the “risk” vs “pricing” issue gets resolved and the more likely the project is to succeed.

We call this “Minding the Gap” and we learnt to do this because the reality in large projects is that there is rarely only one gap. The need to “Manage the Gap” is just as great as the need to recognise it in the first place. Even Agile / SCRUM projects can fail if you fail to properly “Manage the Gap”.

Every issue represents a potential chasm for funds and resources to pour into and that is why Issue Tracking tools like Gemini can be extremely beneficial to all parties concerned.

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