Project management documentation: both ridiculed and respected

This must sound like one of driest and dullest blogs possible, but bear with me. I was faced recently with an example where it was suggested someone’s time would be far better spent on designing a project than completing a business case for it. This is, I'm sure, a conversation many people who support robust project management will have had, and I'm sure one I'll have again. I'm certain a quick Google will reveal lots of webpage’s commenting on the validity of such a comment from a pro / con of project management status, so I won't delve deeply into that discussion here. Rather, I'm intrigued as to why this comes up at all.

I doubt you'll find many people who suggest project management is a waste of time, and yet the difference between acceptance that project management should be applied and that formal project management should be applied could hardly be more diverse. Getting people to buy-in to project management documentation is the grown-up equivalent of getting your children to eat their greens. Why’s it so hard?

Formal project management documentation takes time to do, no matter how slim it is. I've used pure PRINCE2 templates and some heavily slimmed down versions, and all of them need thought. That in itself is part of the point: they make you think about some things that might otherwise bite you in the proverbial later. Not spending that time might well cost you an awful lot - in time, money, and reputation - in the long run, but a) it is only "might cost you", and b) you definitely save time from not completing formal documentation in the first place. Even so, it’s not hard to find well-respected books and materials that argue that formal project management is ‘a good thing’ and will deliver a strong ROI on the time spent. There has even been formal research into it at the University of California (which you can buy if you’re really interested: The Benefits of Project Management.) Despite this general acceptance of benefit, though, people still play the lottery that they might get away with it, even on large, complex programmes.

Part of this is how psychologically we operate and rationalise some things. Simply put, if I succeed in my exam it's because I'm smart / brilliant / worked hard. If I fail, it's because I was unlucky with the questions, didn't feel well, or the course concepts were badly taught. We have a tendency to internalise successes and externalise failures. There is nothing abnormal in this; in psychology, this ‘self-serving bias’ is quite well understood and studied.

So how does this relate to project management and documentation? Let's consider a project manager who has been running projects for years without any documentation and a project manager who's also been running projects, but who has applied documentation like business cases and change control. Both project managers are successful. The one using documentation can internalise success here partly because they have used good standards of documentation. As success leads to learned behaviour, they'll continue to use it because it's worked before. In other words, they see that their decision and use of the documentation helps deliver success, so they keep using it. The 'by the seat of the pants' project manager also internalises the success as being due to their actions, but obviously this time it doesn't include documentation, and so the learned behaviour can partly be that they don't need it to succeed.

So far, so good, but what happens when the proverbial hits the fan? Both project managers are equally as likely to externalise the failure as not their fault and due to factors beyond their control. Where things differ with project management documentation is that the document-friendly PM will consider – amongst other things – whether the project documentation was robust. They won’t necessarily question their decision to use the documentation (which is quite correct), but they will consider whether the use and application of the documentation (an external factor) was at fault. This may lead to improvements in their use of project documentation, improving the probability of successful delivery of future project.

What the seat of the pants project manager is unlikely to do, though, is to consider that their approach of not using project management documentation contributed to the failure. This is because that would involve accepting the failure as being caused by them self. Perhaps the project failed because the requirements were not clearly understood. This is something that good documentation could relatively easily address, but the project manager is likely to attribute the project failure to the individual or group that misunderstood or were responsible for communicating the requirements to the project manager. That the manager could have used better (or even any!) project documentation to prevent this problem is unlikely to be high up on the list of considerations.

The problem this presents is in demonstrating the value of formal project management to sceptics, as both positive and negative views on it can be self-reinforcing due to how we mentally deal with successes and failures. Again, as success leads to learned behaviours, the longer a project manager operates ‘informally’, the harder the shift will be to accomplish.

At this point it is important to note that I’m making very broad generalisations; I’m discussing general trends in behaviours and approaches and these will vary quite a lot between people. One thing to note, however, is just because a project manager accepts responsibility for a failure or problem does not mean they are accepting it was their fault. I’ve seen many project managers accept responsibility for problems, but never question their view that it was a factor beyond their control that caused the problem; I know, because I’ve done it myself. Whilst the acceptance of responsibility is always good, the lack of reflection about the problem’s cause and their own part in it is not; unless the issue truly was outside their control, they have an opportunity to learn from a situation that may happen again. Without learning, the failure may happen again too.

So what are the practical ramifications of all this? First, success reinforces behaviour, so if a project manager runs a successful project with documentation they are more likely to use it again. The same holds true for a manager that doesn’t. As formal project management is hardly something people do instinctively, good practice has to be taught, and because people repeat previous behaviours, it needs to be taught as early as possible in a project manager’s career. Good training is vital. Secondly, project managers must be encouraged to produce lessons learnt reports at the end of a project. Lessons learnt are not only there as a cataloguing tool for the file, but also offer a very useful opportunity for the PM to sit down and reflect on the project. This ‘thinking time’ is probably more useful for the project manager to reflect themselves than the resulting lessons learnt document is to the organisation that employs them.

The greatest benefit a company-wide approach and requirement for project management brings is that it compels the use of formal techniques that might otherwise be ignored. Whilst this will help embed good practice in a “catch ‘em young” way for new project managers, the real benefit is to those old hands that are also the most likely to object to and resist a corporate implementation. As we have seen, it can sometimes be these project managers that need such an approach to help them overcome their own way of thinking.

A step closer to immortality or a step too far?

There are relatively few things that almost everyone has an opinion about. Human cloning, though, seems to be one of them. Ever since Dolly the sheep was cloned, the topic of cloning and human cloning in particular has been a fairly hot one. (This is, of course, despite the fact that even the scientists involved at the time were at pains to emphasis how far away cloning a sheep was from cloning a human, but then you can’t blame the mass media for trying to sell newspapers.) I’m not going to write here on the debate about whether human cloning is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but rather I wanted to focus on a more theoretical aspect that jumps ahead in time (whether that be ten years or a hundred) to when human cloning is possible.

I question that anyone seriously doubts that human cloning will one day be possible: it may well be possible now if a dedicated – and potentially suicidal given the likely public reaction – group of scientists really wanted to ‘have a go’. I want, however, to focus on something that is very much impossible: downloading a human consciousness from one person into a clone. Whilst it’s the stuff of science fiction, it could theoretically offer a route to near immortality.

Perhaps Descartes’ most famous – if not necessarily most important – legacy is the phrase cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Broadly, he was proposing that the mind is separate to the body and to some extent this sort of statement is a basic requirement for ‘downloading’ into a clone. If there is no way of separating out the mind from the biological growth of the human brain – which is at the level of neural patterns unique in every one of us – then we must give up on this particular form of immortality as a lost hope. If, though, this can be overcome, if the information encoded in the brain can be captured then what is it we have captured? Have we managed to capture – to copy – a human soul, the essence of who each of us is, or have we simply copied like words from someone’s diary descriptions that have lost their true brilliance? Have we simply preserved a description of the event, but lost the essence of it, its meaning? Consider how you would write about eating your favourite food after a hard day’s work: could you ever capture the real feeling of the event, however extravagant your text?

Although this rather philosophical line of discussion may seem a little removed from the main topic it becomes vitally important if cloning is a form of immortality. If I’m going to download into a new body, I’d rather like to know that it is ‘me’ that is going to wake up. In the same way that the brain is infinitely more than the sum of its parts, then so too who we are is rather more than simply the sum of our experiences. Whether it is ‘us’ when we awake in our nice new body (complete with full 30 year parts and warranty insurance, with 5 year complimentary accidental damage cover) has profound implications for what happens next.

Just as there are ‘windows of opportunity’ for surgery, beyond which it becomes increasingly hazardous to do a heart transplant or hip replacement etc, so too I suspect leaving a download until you die naturally is probably not a good idea. This suggests that downloads are probably best done when there are still opportunities to correct things if something goes wrong, or indeed you may be suffering a prolonged and painful illness that you’d rather avoid. You go to sleep in one body and then you wake up in another. Here’s the kicker: now there’re two of you. Let’s set aside the possible psychological issues for a moment to consider what happens to the ‘previous model’. It’s probably still ticking along unconsciously so the doctors can make sure all has gone well. Assuming you’re ok, the plug now has to be pulled. If you are indeed ‘you’, and everything has transferred, then it could be argued that this is not murder: one cannot murder oneself. (The closest would be suicide, but for obvious reasons this doesn’t fit either.) What if, though, it is not you that wakes up? Then it’s murder. I suspect proving the debate either way will keep the lawyers in Armani for a very long time. (By the time human cloning of this kind is possible (if ever) you can bet the legal system won’t have caught up to deal with it (it hasn’t even caught up to deal with the Internet yet), so what’s legal will need to work within existing terms.)

How society deals with your new found self is also interesting, from both a social and a business viewpoint. Are you still the father or mother of your children? I suspect there will be small genetic variations from original to clone, but these could still be accounted for by having resulted in differences that arise naturally in genetic variation from parent to child. How do you relate to your own children, who are now older than you are? The social impacts would probably be far bigger and longer-term than any legal or technological aspect needing resolution.

If you’ve read this far and are hoping for some answers to the many questions I’ve raised, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed: I have only more questions. I want to emphasis that this blog is intended only as something to stimulate thought and your own questions – it’s far from a complete discussion. For example, I’ve treated ‘the clone’ as an object for simple writing convenience, which has allowed me to avoid thorny issues like whether a clone has rights before it is ‘peopled’ with someone’s memories. After all, the clone’s brain has been busy even if it is kept unconscious: what happens to its memories, the things that make it who it is as our memories make us who we are?

For my own part, I think human cloning is inevitable and unavoidable. Laws might prohibit it, but someone will still do it: a scientist because ‘they can’; a billionaire because they love life or are afraid of death. It won’t matter whether the download can be guaranteed as a complete transfer or not. One day society is going to have to look at questions like those I’ve raised here and decide how to answer them: that day will be hard, that day will be painful, that day will be full of disputes, and that day is coming.

The economics of ‘the real world’

Most of us have ‘pet phrases’ that get rolled out a lot in our speech. One of my colleagues uses the phrase ‘in the real world’ when frequently comparing the public sector we work in to that of private sector. Normally, it’s in a sentence like “this is the sort of idiocy that doesn’t happen in the real world”. In some respects, this touches on one of the debates of modern time: should the public sector try to emulate the private sector? Ever since privatisation in the UK in the 1980s, where large then-public industries such as water and power utilities were sold-off, there has been a strong and continual push for public sector to be more like private. In an extreme form, this has led to what might almost be described as a ‘public sector bad, private sector good’ mentality in some areas.

The ‘real world’ represents sane, rational results, whereas in this case public sector may well be thought of as cloud-cuckoo land. I find at times – loathe perhaps as I might be to admit it – my colleague isn’t wrong. Sometimes there are things that do seem to make no sense. Be that as it may, though, I still think that ‘the real world’ is rather more complex than at first things appear.

To appreciate this, we have to consider that to some extent the public sector exists to complement the private sector: the capitalist, market driven economy is imperfect, and that imperfection is addressed – at least in part – by the public sector. The most common example of this are ‘public goods’, which are those that are needed, but that the market can’t effectively provide. The reasons for this vary, but relate to the good not being easily chargeable. The economics behind it (relating to excludability, the rival nature of consumption and so on) are a bit dull and boring, but the bottom line is its easy to know who has a chocolate bar and is eating it, and therefore who to charge. It is very difficult for the market to make that same judgement about footpaths, street lights, and parks, and it is impossible for it to make the judgement about things like ‘air’. These are goods we all can or do use, to whatever extent we like, and whenever we want.

If the market won’t provide them, then someone else has to, and that ‘someone’ is generally the government. We all pay for them via our taxes, regardless as to the extent we use them or indeed the extent we want to. The theory then goes that government takes this pot of cash and uses it to provide the things we all want or need, such as street lights, but also national security and welfare.

That the nature of public sector is partly to offset some of capitalism’s market failures also touches on an area where public sector differs from the private sector: its isolation from market forces. Private sector businesses are more directly exposed to changes to their environment than public sector is, and I don’t think it could be suggested as being otherwise. That there have been attempts, such as in the NHS, to introduce more in the way of markets and market forces into public sector might point to the limited exposure to market forces as being seen as a negative factor – almost taking us back to the ‘public sector bad, private sector good’ statement earlier – but again I don’t think it’s that simple. The limitation of market forces is necessary because – if taken to the extreme – market failure through public goods would mean public sector couldn’t practically exist: the sector is there to provide the things the market won’t, so market forces would act as a counter to constrain this and be inappropriate.

So public sector gets a bit of an easy ride? Not necessarily. The markets don’t consistently check the behaviour and delivery of public sector, which can and does lead to inefficiency, but public sector has a level of scrutiny applied to itself and its finances significantly more taxing than that of private sector, and indeed it should be. If a business isn’t efficiently using its resources, the market will generally apply pressure to sort that out. In public sector, that pressure comes from elected members and us, the public, who want every penny used as wisely as possible.

The rules for how public money is spent are complex, with many checks and balances to ensure transparency, accountability and good value for money. Whether they actually work or are counter-productive is a topic for another time! What is clear is that they present public sector significantly less flexibility than private sector: what it can do and how it can act is greatly constrained. A simple, but illustrative, example is that of staff suggestion schemes. Large companies have been known to offer substantial pay-outs to employees that save or make them money. (I seem to recall – but don’t quote me – that either HP or 3M saved over $300m in annual costs through the first year of its global staff ideas scheme, paying out about 10% of it.) It’s simple business: Bob finds a way of saving £500k a year, so we’ll give him £50k. Everyone’s happy. This would be very difficult – if not impossible – to do in public sector, which is a huge shame given the potential opportunity. The focus would be on the £50k Bob’s been paid, not the £450k he’s saved.

So we have a private sector operating more flexibly than the public, but with exposure to market forces and the unpredictability and change that that entails, and we have a public sector trying to pick some of the things up that are needed but that by the nature of market forces the private sector can't do effectively. I don't think that either scenario gets to be more 'real' than the other: just different. They are simply two perspectives looking at the same thing slightly differently, with different goals and different pressures. It is, then, hardly surprising they operate differently. I’m not suggesting public sector should divorce itself from some of the advances in management, procurement, etc developed in private sector, all of which – applied intelligently – can and will be useful for bettering public service delivery. What I am suggesting is that as with any two perspectives, any two ‘windows on the world’, both are inherently limited in their view and abilities, and it’s time to accept that public sector has much to offer private sector in terms of learning and effectiveness, just as vice versa.

If we want to catch a glimpse at the real world – whatever that may be – then it’s probably best we look through as many windows as we get chance to.