Project Management Lessons From Five Classic Movies

A great film can do much more than just provide a couple of hours of entertainment. The best movies also make you think. Reflecting on the journey to get my PMP certification, I realized many classic films provide valuable project management lessons from the mistakes their characters make. Here are five of my favorites:

Star Wars

The Empire in George Lucas’ iconic space opera clearly has a project management problem. Even after spending billions of Galactic Credits on the Death Star, they let a simple design flaw slip through. Exhaust ports should not connect directly to a reactor. Even a first-year architecture student from the Outer Rim knows that a direct hit with a proton torpedo could lead to a disastrous chain reaction. So, what happened?

The facts are clear. Brilliant scientist Galen Erso was forced to design the station. In a brave act of rebellion, he built-in the design flaw. His daughter led the team that lost their lives to steal the Death Star’s schematics. The Rebels use the plans to find the weakness and attack. Some random Imperial analyst sees the problem within minutes of the assault starting, but Grand Moff Tarkin doesn’t take the threat seriously. The Rebel X-Wings are so small they evade the station’s Turbo Lasers. Darth Vader has to take on the Rebels in his TIE fighter but fails to stop Luke Skywalker from making a direct hit on the faulty port. The Death Star explodes. Vader survives to hopefully find someone more competent to build his next battle station.

There are so many different areas where things went wrong here…

Galen Erso was no fan of the Empire. Someone should have been reviewing his work more closely. Poor stakeholder management.

If an analyst can quickly discover the exhaust port flaw once the attack starts, you’d think the QA team could have caught it sometime during testing. Bad quality management.

The Death Star can’t easily cope with an assault by small craft. Seems like an issue that ought to have been identified earlier. Terrible risk management.

It doesn’t take someone strong in the Force to realize the entire project management plan was compromised. Ultimately, the Death Star is an example of a failure to integrate all aspects of a project successfully. Maybe the project team was afraid to speak up when they found something wrong. It’s hard to blame them when the boss responds to problems like this:

Being able to work with a difficult leader is one thing, but in this case, I’d consider finding a new job!

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Steven Spielberg’s classic about first contact with an alien species is an object lesson in poor stakeholder management. The authorities responsible for overseeing the project commit a cardinal sin of project management when they fail to understand their clients’ intentions.

To be fair, the aliens are not the easiest group to work with. For one thing, they can only communicate using music and sign language. Language barriers are always tricky, but it’s not like the project team didn’t know about this limitation from the start.

The aliens could also have been more upfront about the fact they wanted certain people to attend their initial meet and greet at Devil’s Tower. Putting cryptic images into people’s heads is a creative solution to get around the language problem. But seeing Richard Dreyfuss’ utility worker reduced to tears while sculpting a mini replica of the iconic rock formation out of mashed potatoes makes you think they could have come up with a better approach.

Project managers don’t always get to pick their clients, though. It’s part of the job to help clients with weaknesses understand the situation and work with them provide what is needed for the project to succeed.

Where the authorities ultimately fail is when Dreyfuss and others like him show up at Devil’s Tower. These stakeholders are there for a reason. Don’t just send them away with some cock and bull story about toxic nerve gas leaking from a derailed train. Avoiding a difficult issue only prolongs problems leading to further complications.

Thankfully, the management team eventually listens to one insightful French scientist who sees things for what they are. It can be hard to admit a mistake, but including Dreyfuss in the Earth’s astronaut corps at the last minute clearly made the alien clients happy. In the end, it’s important to remember that is what good project management is all about.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Managing communication can be one of the trickier items for any project manager to handle. The goal of any successful project is for the needed information to be shared with the appropriate stakeholders at the right time. Dr. Heywood Floyd, in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece, fails at this task with tragic results.

As the spaceship Discovery heads towards Jupiter, only the onboard HAL 9000 series computer knows the real purpose of the mission. The ship’s crew is not aware of the fact that a mysterious monolith was found on the moon eighteen months earlier and that it directed a powerful transmission towards Jupiter.

If you trust astronauts with your billion-dollar spacecraft, you ought to be able to trust them with the reason for the mission too. Dr. Floyd, who was not on the Discovery, would in 2010 blame the “goddamn White House.” It’s unclear if that was the truth, but as the project manager, he bears ultimate responsibility for what happened anyway.

And his mistakes didn’t stop with communications. Sadly, the risk of withholding critical information from the crew was not correctly quantified either. When the HAL 9000 goes rogue while trying to maintain the integrity of the mission, it shouldn’t catch everyone by surprise. We all know how temperamental cutting-edge technology can be.

Making matters worse, astronauts Bowman and Poole make communications mistakes of their own. They take great pains to discuss HAL’s odd behavior out of earshot but fail to account for the fact the advanced computer can read lips. It’s easy to blame Dr. Floyd again, though. Seems like that kind of thing that should have been in the mission manual.

Fortunately, astronaut Bowman survives his homicidal computer, finds another mysterious monolith near Jupiter and takes a journey beyond the infinite. Had communications been better-handled and risk responses properly prepared, the rest of the team would have lived to help him celebrate when he turns into a giant space fetus.

Jurassic Park

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s best-selling novel is riddled with risk management mistakes. The idea of recreating extinct species of dinosaurs could be considered a risk not sufficiently thought through from the start. Someone was going to do this at some point anyway, so it’s hard to fault the InGen corporation from giving it a try. They needed better project management to help them mitigate the project risks, though. A quick rundown shows the carelessness of the team.

Using frog DNA to fill in the missing gaps in the recovered dinosaur DNA is a brilliant idea. So is engineering all the recreated animals as females so that they can’t reproduce. Put these two ideas together though, and the risks are strikingly apparent. What is the impact of the frog DNA on the dinosaur’s genome? What if it enables reproduction to happen anyway? It took brilliant scientist Dr. Ian Malcom no time at all to review the set-up and note that “life finds a way.” And of course, it did.

What about building the park in an area subject to tropical cyclone activity? Also a shockingly bad idea. At least it seems like there was a disaster plan in place. The majority of the park’s workers are sensibly evacuated. But didn’t anyone consider what to do with the dinosaurs if the power goes out and the electrified fences containing them fail? Apparently not.

And what’s the deal with having kids and scientists roam around the park when a storm is imminent. That seems like something that could have been rescheduled.

Add a shocking lack of security to the mix so that rogue workers can easily steal dinosaur embryos, and Jurassic Park makes the tragedy that happened decades earlier at Westworld seem tame by comparison. (Speaking of which, maybe the project team should have studied that robot led disaster as a use case.)

Almost worse than all of these is the project team’s shocking lack of completeness during the post-project review. Brushing aside the dinosaur breeding facility on another tropical island directly led to to the tragic events in the sequel The Lost World. Seriously people. Learn from your mistakes.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Poor scheduling can lead to the end of the world. Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black comedy illustrates this fact with amused contempt. Unlike other movies, where a comedy of errors leads to a tragic outcome, this film shows how just one poorly thought out plan can lead to catastrophic consequences.

The Soviets, while trying to keep up with the arms race, the space race, and the peace race, build the ultimate doomsday weapon. Rather than spend hundreds of millions on more bombs and missiles, the Soviets figured it made sense to just construct a device to wipe out all of humanity if their country is attacked. A thorough risk analysis would probably lead to many reasons this project shouldn’t have gone forward. In fact, German expatriate scientist Dr. Strangelove working for the Americans deduced the chance of total global annihilation made deploying a doomsday machine not worth the risk. But risk management was never a Soviet strong suit.

They compounded the problem by deploying the automated device before telling the world about it. This blunder misses the entire point of the project. The reason behind the doomsday project is to produce fear in the mind of an enemy. Any attack will also cause their demise. But this only works if you tell the world you have a doomsday device. Sadly, the Russians were waiting until the Party Congress the next Monday. As the Soviet ambassador explained, “As you know, the Premier loves surprises.” Add bad stakeholder management to the list of problems.

Sadly, everyone was surprised when unhinged American General Jack D. Ripper launches an attack against Russia on his own. When one plucky U.S. bomber makes it through to its target, total nuclear obliteration soon follows. 

As the world is about to explode, at least the Americans implement their plan to use mine shafts to keep a small sample of humanity alive. Unlike their Soviet counterparts, that is some top-quality risk management!