by Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

Turn on your television and try not to look at CSI Miami, NYC or Tonopah. It is amazing how popular crime series are, crime series where the technicians will save the day. It must be a universal thing, as the series are as popular in Europe as in The United States. For a Project Manager it is a great inspiration. They find a dead corpse and an FBI Profiler is brought on the scene. He looks around, sniffs the air and creates a nice profile of the potential killer. Gut feeling, combined with a mix of experience and science may transform a dark alley into a rich source of evidence.

When looking daily at the remains of your planning you probably feel like an FBI Profiler, or more appropriate, a Project Profiler. Look at the evidence and know the problem: death by control. Like at the FBI, based upon assumptions a profile is created. New information can lead to new assumptions and a new profile. But also the underlying assumptions steer the direction of the investigation, hoping to find evidence that support the probability of the profile. So, it is not just a matter of information gathering, and presto, you have a clear cut description of the problem. It is a lot of backward and forward reasoning. Based upon some first sparse info snippets assumptions are made, and as time progresses you get a cycle of assumptions leading to the direction of investigation and information leading towards change in assumptions.

To be able to create assumptions and being able to reason to what happens based upon those assumptions, you need models, you need metaphors. They provide you with a simplified version of reality which makes it possible for us mortals to have a clue about what happens if we press button A or button B, take the blue or the red pill. To be able to perform an analysis of a problem in a project we need metaphors about project reality.

Metaphors for managing projects have been widely used to visualize the various needs of project and seeing these needs through various lenses. Metaphors are not just linguistic devices for making the task of reading more interesting, they are the basic means whereby people create their relationship with the world. In fact, the study of several metaphors used in project management reveals how attitudes to project management developed and the focus to which project management attuned to.

Different Metaphors

The literature is rich in employing metaphors in project management. We will review very briefly on selected, but widely different metaphors as a necessary prelude to introduce the fish pond metaphor.

The machine metaphor is a established one and has been sharply criticized for treating humans as machines and the metaphors false assumption that it is possible to predict the outcome of projects. The rate of project failure provides enough support to discredit this metaphor. The ignorance of human factors and their interactions are among the strongest factors against the machine metaphor. The advancement of communication technology led to extreme changes in the management of projects. Virtual teams, data collection, visualization and mining, rising competition, the emergence of the value of intangible assets and innovation and throat-cutting competitions exemplify the rapid changes in doing business today that call for new project management approaches.

Recent metaphors have taken more consideration of new project management requirements than the machine metaphor. Examples include:

• The Extended Mirror Metaphor (Timothy Johnson, 2008)- The use of extended mirrors to see beyond the present is an excellent metaphor for project planning because it stretches the thinking process and imagination to enter a space before physically entering it. In defining your requirements, you have to mentally go forward, then look in your rear view mirror and mentally drive backward through your project, define your route (plan your scope), and then actually drive forward.
• Helicopters Metaphor- helicopters allow the seeing of the forest with the simultaneity of allowing for zooming on the trees. For projects, this metaphor allows for overseeing the overall progress or zooming on certain tasks. We believe this metaphor may be further enriched by supplying the helicopters with infrared camera, CIS information system and meteorological data to capture information and plan ahead.
• Star Wars Metaphor (Phil Bennett, 2006) - This metaphor links the roles in the movie with the roles that project managers undergo
• The Chimpanzees Tea Party (Helga Drummond and Julia Hodgson, 2003) - This is a very interesting metaphor and in a way remind us of chicken herd. The Chimpanzees follow no rules and chaotic party results. How to bring order into project is what this metaphor provides skillfully. This metaphor highlights the limits of assumptions and shows how control-based approaches to project management can be counterproductive. Paradoxically, situations may arise where projects can be more effectively controlled by not attempting to impose control. This metaphor is in essence another example of the extended mirror metaphor.
• The Pie Metaphor (Kevin Shockey, 2005) - This is an interesting metaphor on how to allocate project resources to project tasks and how to expand on the share of a tasks pie. The pie metaphor gives a useful way to relate to management. Sometimes it is who puts on the biggest show that gets more pie.

Models Effect Reality

The mindsets, the metaphors in your head, are a very powerful tool. They really do affect reality in a sense that the effect the decisions and behavior of the people that hold them. When using metaphors you are taking the images of a different system, and use that to describe, to model the workings of the system at hand. The use of the famous metaphor as mentioned earlier, that of a machine when looking at an organization, meant neglecting the individual character of every employee.

People can talk about projects as if they are conducting a war. They are using words like marching orders and the troops. If a Project Manager has a mindset like this, war as a metaphor, his mind is thinking in friends and foes, allies and enemies. You are either with him or against him. This view of the world will make it very difficult to collaborate with this person if you disagree. In the end, the war metaphor effects reality. If the model is powerful enough and wide spread among more people, the model will even become a reality. The project will end up as a war.

If models can have such an impact on the performance of reality, you almost have to be aware of the images that people try to fill in your head.

In courses on corporate governance grounded in agency theory ¦ we have taught our students that managers cannot be trusted to do their jobs -which, of course, is to maximize shareholder value- and that to overcome agency problems, managers interests and incentives must be aligned with those of the shareholders by, for example, making stock options a significant part of their pay. ¦ Why then do we feel surprised by the fact that executives in Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco and scores of other companies granted themselves excessive stock options¦? [1]

Ghosal [1] in the same article sums it up pretty nicely:

Unlike theories in the physical sciences, theories in social sciences tend to be self-fulfilling.

We are raising this point at because most of the practitioner are not aware of this phenomenon, and its effects can be disastrous. Therefor, everyone should stop and think for a short moment contemplating this matter. If you perhaps used to work in environments very influenced by corporate politics, the metaphor created for yourself could be that of monkey hill where all the baboons are showing off their butts to each other in the eternal struggle for having the most red butt. Although this model can help you to run my projects in such an environment, after a couple of years all you can remember is that you are working in a zoo. Everything you see is getting translated into an image of a political arena. In the end, you almost become what you hated in the first place.

On this note, while we are heading towards our Fish Pond metaphor, we want to close with the following quote:

Conceptual metaphors that make society seem more like a machine, operating on an efficient and predictable basis, probably act to weaken society, Homer-Dixon suggests. Other conflict theorists suggest that those based on ecosystems, which have redundancy, much layering and waste disposal capacity, are probably more likely to prepare us for disaster even if they can't avoid the physical impacts.

[1] Sumantra Ghosal, Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices, Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2005, Volume 4, No 1, 75-91

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas de Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of www.SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.