The managers from a consulting firm I work with 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 performance review. I actually believe that trusted advisor ideas and “techniques” are solid, money-making and morally good. Unfortunately, I’m not …
Forecasting through Role Playing
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 of how well …
IT Workers Strategize Differently About Problems
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
Project Management Methodologists vs. Theorists
Project management in software is hard for a variety of reasons. In the December 3, 2003 edition of the Application Developer Management e-newsletter, Scott Withrow 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 …