Today our American cousins celebrate Thanksgiving Day. Being the naturally skeptical person that I am, I would normally be the first in line to poke the ritual with a stick.
However, on more than one occasion since moving to the UK, I have found myself in the company of friends. A group of self-made ex-pats with much to give thanks about. There was a time in a flat in London when we were all in a kitchen quaffing champagne - and we toasted the moment; let us celebrate the fact that we are all here drinking champagne and how lucky we are. Realise that 'but for the grace of God go I' and there is not as much difference between the person in the high-rise office and the homeless person on the street, as you might think.
This kicked off a tradition amongst some of us and the next year we went to the Mayflower pub on the banks of the Thames, at the place where the famous shipped tied up in London before heading to Plymouth and onto the New World - once again that year, we had much to give thanks for.
And then there was hosting an American work colleague and his visiting sister and brother-in-law for Thanksgiving. It didn't help that we started drinking at lunchtime, but we ended up having a hilarious Thanksgiving curry and enjoyed the Bon Hommie, ending up semi naked in our front room at 3am teaching an American how to do the Haka!
One thing I really enjoy doing is pouring water on those boastful conversations. The other day someone was recounting to a group of us stories about their boat (we're talking a 'big' boat) and how the couple on the neighboring berth owned some big company blah blah blah. When a break in the conversation came I jumped in "we were talking the other day about the time when you were the most down on your luck, when you were close to the bone financially - what are people's stories?" Even the big rich guy had a story of his university days, thrashing around in the bottom of a clapped out Robin Reliant looking for loose change to go into the supermarket to buy food. I found these conversations far more meaningful than the "guess where we're going for our holidays next year" emphatic communion people usually indulge in. It made people appreciate what they had and to be thankful for those things and not vulgar.
So to anyone anywhere with a drink in their hand, raise it high and give thanks.
Despite the best efforts of Project Management guru's and the developers of Project Management systems to deliver truly global, streamlined and accurate means of managing increasingly complex projects, it would seem legislation throughout Europe it set to keep us in the dark ages.
I'm talking about the various forms of the Data Protection Act (DPA) throughout the states of Europe.
First of all let's look at a couple of the basic requirements we have in order to manage any project:
(1) the ability to communicate with team members and stakeholders; and
(2) the ability to track effort expended against effort budgeted;
(1) Project communication under DPA
So I discovered the other day from an appointed DPA officer. Most big companies run some kind of corporate address book typically in their email application. When you want to contact someone, you look them up and you probably at least an email address and a telephone number that you can use.
Did you know? That in the UK you are at liberty to ask your company to remove your entry from any such database? Therefore any such collection of project contact information should be approved by an appointed DPA officer and subject of a DPA audit? In other EU countries you are at liberty to "opt in" for your information to be held electronically, that is, the default position is that a company can not keep this information on you.
(2) Tracking effort expended on a project under DPA rules
All companies I have worked for have had some form of Time Entry System by which you record you breakdown of hours worked each week. This is typically where project cost codes are used to capture how much effort has been expended against your project and what labour charges will hit your project budget.
Did you know? Any member of your project team in the EU is at liberty to opt out of using this time recording system, thereby rendering your ability to accurately record the effort expended useless. This flies in the face of trying to accurately portray a projects position through tools, such as Earned Value, that are being touted by various PM methodologies.
So imagine the scenario...
You're the PM for a high value government project...
Your project team decide to opt out of (1) & (2) rendering your powerless to communicate across your team and unable to simply and accurately record, in a timely fashion, what work has been completed for what cost, on this huge government project.
How long would it take before the project went completely pear-shaped and some corporate officer was hauled in front of (in the UK) a Commons Select Committee to explain why this project was performing so badly?
And how well would it wash when the limitations of the DPA were brought home to roost?
Forget project insurance for Terrorism and acts of God, you can't insure against workers exercising ridiculous rights that would scupper the best efforts of the Project management fraternity overnight. Some would argue that the DPA has been around for a while and it hasn't caused the catastrophe you warn about - well thats true but find me a competent PM that gets away with evaluating risk by saying 'it hasn't happened yet'. Equally, in todays environment we are truly starting to require a global project management model, whereas previously we had only managed to achieve an aggregation of individual country projects. This move to develop and define systems that can operate across legislative boundaries as well as timezones needs to be able to remove the barriers to true global project management, if it is to succeed. Where today we are off-shoring and near-shoring more and more niche skills, we will find that in order to staff up multi-disciplinary project teams in the future, we will need to operate a global project management model that can easily communicate and collaborate using the latest tools.
