Ed Kless Is Wrong

Once again, the self-proclaimed Defender of the Timesheet and Champion of the Dissenters, Greg Kyte, is at it again. This time he takes me on rather than Ron Baker of VeraSage.

Dear Ron,

Quite awhile ago, I sent the following letter to the Journal of Accountancy, but apparently they were too scared to print the truth. Enjoy as I expose the falsehood of your co-conspirator, Ed Kless.

In April 2010 the Journal of Accountancy published the article, Project Management for Accountants by Ed Kless. Although the article contained a significant number of words, many of those words created lines, and if one reads between those fabricated lines, one may find the same offensive subtext that I found. The author is waging a guerilla war – not against gorillas, but against the accounting profession. Project management is for ignoble professions such as contractors, engineers, and doctorate-level pharmacology researchers. Project management may be good enough for those and other financial Cro-Magnons. We accountants, however, are the progeny of a dignified tradition, and our collective pecuniary prowess has led us as a community to a near-universal acceptance and usage of the financially sophisticated and elegantly simple concepts of the billable hour and the timesheet.

Mr. Kless’ approach to project management is his attempt to rob our profession of the fringe benefits that accompany the billable hour and the timesheet. In his article, Fast Eddie lists eleven essential components of a scope statement. He advocates the use of a scope statement because it is designed to limit “scope creep”; however, he ignores that fact that under the billable hour paradigm, scope creep creates revenue. Ergo, Fast Eddie is trying to decrease your firm’s revenue, and if you consult your accountant, she’ll verify that revenue is a good thing.

In his opinion, all assumptions between a firm and a client are to be clearly enumerated. Mr. Kless exhorts us to “answer the question, ‘What should we not leave unsaid?’” But since I bill by the hour, there is only one assumption that I can’t leave unsaid—the assumption that if I work on an engagement for an hour, the client is going to pay me for an hour.

I actually liked his idea of maintaining a “future project list.” It’s a list of possible projects and major tasks that will be deferred until the future … like when I need more billable hours.

He argues that constraints need to be brainstormed and specified. Constraints are limitations and restrictions that could hinder the efficiency of an engagement. The article states that constraints are “risks in waiting.” Don’t look at constraints as risks in waiting; look at them as semi-avoidable wellsprings of cash flow.

Possibly the most offensive part of this article was the following assertion made while discussing how to calculate percentage of completion: “Measuring the completeness of your projects by hours billed is akin to listening for the smoke detector to determine when your cookies are done. The alarm only goes off when it’s too late.” This is blatantly invalid. The beauty of using billable hours is that we don’t need to measure completeness. Billable hours and timesheets are actually like cooking with the Ronco Rotisserie and BBQ Oven: “Just set it and forget it!”

Once again, Greg demonstrates that he is quite deserving of his self-developed moniker.