I recently stumbled across an ancient video (ca. 1985) in our family collection of an old TV show called Mad Movies with the L.A. Connection. In this video, a troupe of comedians re-voice and re-edit classic movies with new dialog, creating an entirely different (and generally hilarious) story and plot. By way of example, the classic Shirley Temple flick The Little Princess is recast as a story of a young girl possessed by an evil doll. (The young girl eventually tap-dances her way to wellness).

It reminded me of the quality practice of Technical Performance Measurement (TPM), though I may be the only person who would make that association. TPM is called out in the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge as a risk management practice. It's designed to monitor compliance to specification and requirements in much the same way as earned value monitors compliance to cost and schedule. In fact, it's been cast as "the earned value of quality." TPM adopts and adapts many of the basic practices of earned value management and reworks them to create an entirely new dimension of metric evaluation. By setting metrics for each and every work package and evaluating them either in process or at completion, it allows for consistent, honest progress reporting in terms of the specifications, rather than simply in terms of cost and budget. It's an inspired reapplication of an older project practice. It may also point to where project management should be looking to find best new practices. Rather than just looking at the history of our own profession, perhaps we should be looking to other practices—even other professions—to find some of the best ways to improve how we do what we do.

I believe the similarities between TPM and Mad Movies could be a key indicator of where the future of project management should be headed. Every business, every organization, every practice has its best practices; its practices unique to the profession; its practices modified by individuals and organizations to fit within their organizations. Earned value is adopted in some organizations applying a single value to every hour of work, no matter the pay rate of the person performing it. It is applied in other organizations using modified approaches to dealing with actuals where they are not "actually" available. These are outstanding ideas IF everyone who will be interpreting the data understands how it was generated and why the modified approach was applied.

But how many organizations have other forms, processes, protocols, templates and approaches that cry out to be "re-voiced?" Mad Movies created an entirely new tone, intent and approach with a team of creative people recognizing how the story would work with a different audience.

Accounting has the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP), which is clearly analogous to the PMBOK^® Guide. How many accounting practices could be morphed to map to more effective project management? In the fields of journalism and editing there are style guides and specific behaviors. In medicine, triage practices and patient monitoring procedures have been tested through the centuries.

Over the past twenty years, project management has become a highly introspective practice. The nature of the PMBOK Guide has been to draw attention to standing practice and how it is applied. In the twenty years ahead, if project management is to evolve into a more effective process, it will become progressively more important to look outside the profession to other professions and organizations that have learned tricks of the trade to yield higher performance.

The winners in this race will most likely be those individuals who came to project management later in their careers, after they had the opportunity to learn another career, another approach and another set of protocols for doing business. They will recognize that the tricks they learned in another profession—while not a perfect match—are adaptable to the field of project management.

To expedite this process, those of us already in project management should be studying, analyzing, and parsing the processes of professions outside our own. If the client is a pharmaceutical company, don't look to their project management practices for answers . . . look to some of their standard protocols for preparing for clinical trials. If the client is a shipping company, the newest procedures will not be found in the PMO, but in the methodologies they apply at the loading dock. If we build an awareness of analogous practices and keep our eyes open for new and innovative ways to tweak them to work in the project world, we have the opportunity to generate truly new (and potentially Mad!) practices.