Back to the Future and project management

Here’s a story of a brilliant scientist who doesn’t play by the rules and his over-enthusiastic young acolyte. Together, their recklessness almost collapses time itself. Proof that if you want to avoid messing up the future, you really need a project manager, writes Richard Young.

Time travel films have an amazing pedigree. Classics from The Time Machine to Interstellar have used the paradoxes and ‘what ifs?’ of temporal dislocation to make us think, wonder and laugh. But two film franchises stand out from the crowd: Terminator and Back to the Future. Before we get to today’s case study, it’s worth remembering John Connor’s message of resistance from the future to his own mother in Terminator: “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.” It’s a rallying call, not just for putative time travellers, but for all of us. And it has a special relevance for project professionals looking to the future.

We make choices that determine the future. Our ability to plan, coordinate and predict is the secret to not turning our present into the botched history of a nightmare future. And that project management mindset is precisely where Doc Brown and Marty McFly fail so miserably in Back to the Future (1985). 

For the uninitiated, Marty is a bright but frustrated teen growing up in a dysfunctional household. He loves his band and his skateboard, but wants a bigger life than his small‑town upbringing allows. An early‑hours meeting with his pal and local eccentric Emmett “Doc” Brown – who’s stolen some terrorists’ plutonium to power a time machine built into a DeLorean car – results in him witnessing the scientist’s murder and accidentally travelling back to 1955, where the vehicle runs out of fuel, stranding him in his parents’ past.

The film charts his desperate attempts to get back to the present while undoing the potentially catastrophic changes to his own history that his blundering time travel has caused. For project professionals, it’s a warning from history (or should that be the future?). Look at what happens when you allow a techie and a creative to do what they want without proper organisation. Great Scott, it’s chaos!

Call yourself a scientist?

The warning signs are there from the start. Doc’s theft of the plutonium would fall foul of any organisation’s procurement policy, and not just on the grounds that the supplier audit hadn’t been completed. (“I’m not trying to be difficult, we just don’t seem to have ‘nameless Libyan terrorist group’ on our list of pre‑approved suppliers…”) Storing it under his desk has health and safety implications that would shred any half‑decent risk register. 

Then when Doc and Marty test the DeLorean for the first time, they stand right in the path of the vehicle, even though the technology is far from proven. Sure, we can argue about why adequate prototype evaluation wasn’t factored into the project plan well ahead of user testing. But even if we allow for Doc being an agile kind of guy, making the first test a life‑or‑death decision was overly rash. One thing we can credit Doc for is insisting Marty videotape the experiment. Documenting the project is obviously good practice, both from a scientific and administrative point of view. Had Doc and Marty been run over, at least the project could have been reassigned. But good documentation isn’t an invitation to risk life and limb just because it makes succession planning a bit easier.

So procurement and project safety are all over the place. And when the terrorists arrive in a VW campervan looking for their stolen plutonium, it’s no surprise that Doc ends up dead. Marty uses the DeLorean to get away and accidentally hits 88mph, the magic speed for time travel. Since the top speed for a VW camper is 65mph, we can only assume that Marty either didn’t listen to the project briefing or is just a bad driver – he could have comfortably escaped in third gear. It’s yet another reason Doc should have had a project manager to ensure proper team onboarding and skills evaluation.

Risks and red flags

Of course, it goes deeper than that. Doc decided in 1955 to launch a project to invent time travel, but in the intervening 30 years he’s absolutely failed to answer the question any PMO or supervisory board would ask: why? Dreaming up the flux capacitor might be a moment of genius. But did Doc ever stop to think about the purpose of his invention? About the risks? He needed a decent project manager, not just planning his research, but considering the implications of its possible success.

Health and safety issues are a sideshow, in fact. Trying to harness the power of a lightning strike – the only way back to the future – is reckless but at least it’s a pre‑condition of eventual success. It’s Marty’s interference with his own parents’ courtship that is the starkest reminder that techies and marketing people are often thoughtless. Most of the film is taken up with his attempts to stop his own mother falling in love with him instead of his dad, which any half‑decent project manager would have red‑flagged as a major risk right from the off.

Vanishingly unlikely to succeed

Marty deserves some credit for eventually righting the wrongs. When he and Doc finally sit down for a situation analysis in 1955 and manage to work out the downstream consequences of their actions, they do at least come up with a series of solutions. Sooner or later even the most instinctive genius recognises the need for project planning. And while you could hardly say the family photo in Marty’s wallet is a ‘dashboard’, exactly, at least there’s some kind of project monitoring going on at this point. Seeing his own image slowly vanish as he fails to hit the critical stage gates in the plan is just the kind of motivational tool any project manager would kill for.

A charitable reading would say that the end of the film reveals the purpose to all this time tomfoolery: Marty’s dad is no longer a dweeb in 1985; his mum is a confident, happy pillar of the community; his nemesis a blithering has‑been. But even this is accidental (a result of Marty’s botched plan to get his future parents together by literally sexually harassing his own mother, causing her to #MeToo him in favour of nice George). And it also results in bully Biff becoming the bullied one in the future. Is that fair?

Gantt help falling in love…

In the end, the frustration for the professional project manager in Back to the Future comes from the way it breaks the rules. Not Doc’s hopeless project safety or Marty’s impulsivity – or even the lack of a coherent project purpose. Time itself is the fundamental constraint of project management, and it’s the thing that makes the discipline both hard and rewarding. Sure, time travel can throw challenges into the mix – although in Back to the Future and its sequels, these problems are still principally driven by ill‑discipline on the parts of Doc and Marty. But once you can pop back or forward to tweak things that didn’t go right, the whole concept of planning discipline goes out of the window.

We end up in a world where the passing whims of the business, of marketing, of the user – these all become actionable. Some people might argue that’s a good thing. But as anyone who’s tried to explain ‘agile’ to less‑than‑savvy business users or project sponsors will tell you, the nightmare is people thinking that just because you can adapt to shifting realities as you go, you can change project fundamentals whenever they fancy it. 

In short, don’t diss the Gantt chart. Having a coherent plan for when things have to be done, what those milestones allow you to do next, and where you’re heading makes life a lot simpler. Time travel is real, but we can only move into the future – and only at a predictable one day at a time. While Doc and Marty are jumping back and forward to clean up their own messes, project professionals in the real world know that the past is a firm foundation under the present’s plan for a future that needs reliable shaping. Over to you.

Future paradoxes for project professionals

So what does Back to the Future teach us about the future of project management?

1. Not doing something is a decision... This has become a popular aphorism in the ‘move fast and break things’ culture, usually to chide managers for being slow to act. But sometimes not doing something is a great decision. Project managers sometimes take flak from techies or marketing people for doing things procedurally. But a stable and sustainable future relies on considered choices and discipline under pressure. The projects we choose not to do are important too.
2. … but you can make your own future. Back to the Future also reminds us that small decisions now – in how a project is specced, resourced, designed and targeted – can have a vast impact in the future. They say time travellers shouldn’t even step on a butterfly in case it changes their own future through a cascade of effects. The decisions you take even in simple things like the choice of project methodology or apps will shape your project’s destiny. Choose wisely.
3. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Doc should never have fooled around with time travel – but once he invented it, he couldn’t help himself. It’s the same in project management: if you say something is doable, someone will do it. In Back to the Future, the only person in the entire franchise who has a genuine vision for time travel is bully Biff Bannen in Back to the Future Part II, and his grand plan is defrauding bookmakers. Just because a project is feasible, doesn’t mean you should help it happen.

 

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE AUTUMN 2022 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.