INFOSEC’s managers are sold on the “trusted advisor” idea. This comes from The Trusted Advisor by Charles Green, David Maister and Rob Galford (Free Press, 2000). They bantered this around in my friend’s performanc review. I actually believe that trusted advisor ideas and “techniques” are solid, money-making and morally good. Unfortunately, INFOSEC’s staff don’t understand [...]

[Read more →]

http://www.jscottarmstrong.com
Not Garner Tedd Armstrong (didn’t he go to jail for fraud?) but J Scott Armstrong. He argues pretty presuasively about the use of role playing in forecasting. Since he wrote the book on forecasting — edited, really — it’s worth a read. Take a gander at his response to the response to Kesten Green’s article.

[Read more →]

http://www-marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/people/faculty/armstrong2.html#forecasting
For example. Kesten C. Green has a great paper on the efficacy of role playing vs. game theory vs. individual assessment for conflicts involving small numbers of parties with a lot at stake. He finds that role playing is the only forecasting method he tested that actually predicts what will happen.
http://www-marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/forecast/paperpdf/Greenforecastinginconflict.pdf
Green did a study [...]

[Read more →]

Role playing (and no, we are not talking about a gaming session of Warhamster) has been shown to greatly increase forecasting accuracy, yet it has a pretty bad reputation with the academy. Probably because it does not have a theoretical or mathematical background to it, but more of a three-year old feel

[Read more →]

Scott Withrow writes Builder.com’s application developer management newsletter and this week has tackled “Selecting a Project Manager”. While he is speaking of specifically ones for software development projects, his thoughts could represent the thinking of a range of business functions. Unfortunately, he gets a couple of points quite dangerously wrong.
Are They <sic> a Theorist or [...]

[Read more →]