“I am not good at statistics. So, I am not cut out to be a
project manager,” said a potential PMP aspirant after attending a PMP boot
camp. My heart slipped a few beats to regain my stand and found out from this
potential PMP candidate managing dates in the timeline, evaluating project
slips, looking at contracts for vendor management, and monitoring metrics
demand high mathematical skills for a project manager to be successful.
Let us look at the core knowledge areas in Project
Management Book of Knowledge that includes management of scope, time, cost, risk,
quality, communication, procurement, integration, human resources, and stake
holders. Most of the process groups within each one of these domain knowledge
areas involve qualitative thinking, leadership, organization, negotiation, and
people management skills. For instance, the project manager that asks for what
percentage of a task is completed draws attention in today’s context because
even if 80% of the task is completed, the remaining 20% of the task can take more
time to complete. Understanding people’s commitments and winning consensus
towards project goals is central to task completion, and therefore eventually project
success.
Even when we focus on metrics, such as cost or schedule
variance, schedule or cost performance index, or other earned value metrics
like planned value and actual value, estimate at completion, etc., the
mathematical formulas involve simple subtraction and proportions. Do these mean
they are statistics? How much difficulty exists in comparing the milestone
slips from baseline to actual? Simple office automation tools like Microsoft
Excel can accomplish these computations effectively and if the proper use of
Microsoft Project is used, then these metrics can be easily computed.
Now, let us turn our attention to Agile. Technically,
project plans are not preferred in this setting as the teams are dedicated and
self-managed. The project manager is not managing the tasks. Focus shifts more
towards product features, benefits to business, etc. Neither the estimate
gathering process like planning poker or metric computation like velocity
planning is quantitative. Besides, good application lifecycle management (ALM) tools
like SpiraTeam, Version One, or Rally allow such metric gathering more
effectively. So, where are statistics coming in to play as a core skill of a
project manager?
Let us not leave capital project selection where the
management using steering or governing committee must make a conscious selection
of products to invest or consume resources to work on. These ranking of
projects use basic mathematical concepts like payback period, net present
value, or internal rate of return. None of these methods call for detailed
analysis of variance, kurtosis, skewness, or involve factor analysis.
Besides, if simple observations of ratio and proportion or
central tendency analysis using mean, mode, or median indicate statistical
expertise, then, how much time are a Project Manager spending on such analysis
compared to communicating and managing stakeholder expectations to ensure
project success? It is true that interpreting such data for preventive and corrective actions as well as escalating risks and issues require some understanding of these thoughts. So, is statistics a core skill for PMP aspirants? Readers,
what do you think?
