About a month after giving my first speech at the PMIWDC#01 Toastmasters club my Toastmasters mentor was asking me when I was planning on giving my second speech.  It so happens that one of the more experienced Toastmasters was listening in and suggested that I particpate in the upcoming humorous speech contest (Who me? Funny?).  As a project management club we had also been talking about how dry of a topic the PMBOK, Project Management Body of Knowledge, is and he challenged me to take on the PMBOK for a humorous speech.  Backing down from a challenge is not in my blood so challenge accepted!  I quickly realized how hard it was going to be to make a very dry subject such as project management humorous.  I then thought of using the PMBOK term itself as the subject of the speech but what funny acronym could I build out of the letters P.M.B.O.K.  After much searching and many different ideas it finally came to me while I was in the shower.  Project Management: Beer of Kool-Aid?  From there the rest of the speech came naturally and I actually won the club contest with the speech!  Yes, my humor has been validated by others! LOL  Hope you enjoy.

Many of us are involved in project management, whether at the office or just in our normal activities. Tonight’s contest is evidence of project management at play; from the planning of the food and the participants to the execution of the plan when the Contest Master arrived this evening. Tonight though, I pose to you a question – Project Management: Beer or Kool-Aid?


Mister Contest Master, fellow Toastmasters and welcome guests. I know what you’re thinking. What does beer and Kool-Aid have to do with project management beyond what the budget has available for the project close-out party? It’s simply really. The Project Management Institute, PMI, a global organization that provides a methodology on the management of projects, has brainwashed many into believing that their methodology is crucial to ensuring project success. Far be it for me as one of only 400,000 PMP’s, Project Management Professionals, to argue with the science behind PMI’s madness; however I must bring to light three major issues with the Kool-Aid that PMI has us drinking. Those three areas include Time Management, Risk Management, and Cost Management. Tonight I will show you how the Prohibition Mockery Institute, with it’s beer methodology, fixes these issues and will help you on your way to your PMP, Prohibition Mockery Professional, certification.


It’s obvious to anyone that has been on a project that lasted longer than twenty-four hours or a project more complex than the weekly grocery-shopping trip that PMI has never owned or used a watch or calendar. The Kool-Aid methodology of project management scheduling sounds great with it’s fancy ideas of defining activities, estimating resources for those activities and then putting together very pretty schedules and charts that impress pointy-headed bosses. What these Kool-Aid processes fail to take into account however is Murphy’s Law. Can you say Snowmaggedon? Seriously, who could have ever expected to put in a “management buffer” to support over a full week of office closures? This is where the beer methodology of project management would have made the project run much more smoothly. It’s kinda simple – use the scientific method of a Three-Point analysis of the activity, divide that by 4% and then take the square root. Never again will you fail to have a schedule that takes into account all that Murphy can throw at you.


Now, I can hear the skeptics already – you didn’t do a proper risk management assessment. But even worse than the Kool-Aid approach to time management offered by PMI, is their viewpoint on risk management. One could even compare it to watered down Kool-Aid. PMI states that a project risk is “always in the future and is an uncertain event or condition”. Well I can tell you right now that there are three certain events that will occur that cause risk on your project. One, your project team will be cut in half at some point in the middle of the project, two the budget will disappear just when you are getting ready to place your purchase orders and three, as discussed already, Murphy will play games with your schedule. While these are certain to occur there will be uncertain risks and that is where the Kool-Aid of creating a risk analysis and response really falters. In the Beer methodology of project management the proper way to plan the response to an uncertain risk is to utilize those Fill-In-The-Blank storybooks we had as children. This time though you get your project team together and you storyboard, just like a movie, the project from beginning to end including the identified risks and at certain points you leave a blank. Once this Fill-In-The-Blank story is created you then pass it along to the child of a project team member to fill in. And like magic you have risk response plans that will certainly ensure you are ready for even the worst possible risks that might be thrown your way. No more pretend risk response plans that talk about who to contact or what to do, just the necessary, fill in the blank, to get through the risk.


And if you think that a diluted Kool-Aid version of risk management is scary I implore you to skip the spiked punch of cost management that PMI offers, especially in this town of federal budgets. PMI states in their government extension “effective program managers can often move funds between projects”. Well, let me make it clear to you that this is only the case when there are funds to be moved! Who here hasn’t waited at the end of the fiscal year for Congress to appropriate funds so that our projects can continue? And let’s not forget about those rough estimates that PMI says should be in the +/- 50% range during initiation. Plus minus 50% isn’t rough, that’s out in the boon docks! So here’s how us beer project managers solve this problem. Just as the Federal Reserve can print more money so to will project managers now be able to print project dollars that will be accepted anywhere Visa … uhh … anywhere project management occurs. And just like the federal government we can easily spend as much of this money as we want without worries on how we will pay it back. No more worrying if we’ll be able to order pizza for those daily, two hour long status meetings!


These are just three of the major areas in where the Kool-Aid can throw you off of your project. And now that I’ve been able to enlighten you to the diluted methodology that the Project Management Institute has force-fed to us I am proud to confer upon each and every one of you the Prohibition Mockery Professional certification by the Prohibition Mockery Institute. No studying necessary, no cramming, just listening to this speech!


So remember, as newly certified PMP’s, don’t drink the project management Kool-Aid…have a beer!