Distortion Control

When you manage a two-person two-week project, and you don't even know much about project management methodology and are not using any project management software, the chance that your project will go very wrong isn’t high. But when you run a fifty-people fifty-week project, even if you're trained in PMBOK and Agile and experienced with some project management software, your project still has a reasonable chance of going wrong.

What makes a project hard to manage are its distortions. But how does a distortion start in a project in the first place? Consider the two-person two-week project example, a distortion is unlikely to happen since both people involved in the project can easily remember what happened last two weeks. Even if they didn’t remember and a distortion started, it wouldn’t be hard for them to reveal. The fifty-people fifty-week project example is a different story. A project of such a size would have simultaneous existence of multiple distortions at any time that are difficult to detect and reveal. The opaque environment in turn nurtures more people to misrepresent the facts with defensive lies and lies of omission, which in turn makes the environment even more opaque. Like a rolling snowball, the project environment is getting lies on top of lies until the project is close to its final finish date. All of a sudden, the project changes from 90% complete to 50% complete (see The Myth of 90% Complete).

Instead of saying “lies are common in projects”, we should say “lies are common in workplaces (see The Most Common Workplace Lies”). The more the management team can’t keep the facts straight or the environment is opaque, the more lies will occur since Lying Is Part of Human Nature. Lies are common in projects because even a moderately complex project is beyond a human being’s memory capacity to remember enough details to keep people honest. Would project management software be able to help? Unfortunately, close to all project management tools are passive and their input-processing-output model is very similar to an electronic spreadsheet’s. For example, if you go to the top row of a project plan and change its percentage of complete to 100%, then all the rows underneath it will be automatically changed to 100% with no explanation or traceability information. In other words, they are adequate systems if people’s input to them is always punctual and honest, otherwise they are “garbage-in, garbage-out” systems.

Most transactional systems in the financial service industry aren’t “garbage-in, garbage-out” systems. For example, it is impossible to fool an automated teller machine (ATM) to allow you to withdraw more money than what you have in your account, even if you and your family members are using multiple ATM cards withdrawing money from different locations at the same time. An ATM system is an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) system while close to all project management systems aren’t.

The development of PPM was led by the leaders who developed global derivatives trading systems for one of the largest global bank and securities trading systems and for the world’s top 5 stock exchanges. Their valuable experience and devotion helped create PPM that can apply the 4-eyes principle, prisoner's dilemma game theory and OLTP to avoid “garbage-in, garbage-out”.

Nowadays, project management is being used for client project delivery, project-based procurement, project-based manufacturing, strategic planning and execution, outsourcing, investment management, etc. Partial data integrity (only the project management part) isn’t good enough. End-to-end data integrity is needed.

PPM has prebuilt integration with customer relationship (CRM), supplier relationship management (SRM) and full automation (FAS) systems to apply the 4-eyes principle and OLTP to the end-to-end workflows.