For Friday, here’s “Seven Distinct Paths of Decision and Action” by Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie from 1989. This paper describes the seven different approaches to decision-making, but note that it’s really about action.

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Complexity of Mental Processing (CMP) is significant not only in its relationship with designing requisite organizations and optimizing managerial hierarchy. Would you like your portfolio manager to be Level 1 or Level 8?
The Article

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I wanted to note some interesting articles that I found useful in my work with IT over the past few years, including Risk Management and Escalation of Commitment.
These articles deal with Project Risk Management. Admittedly, I focus on RM for IT projects, so this is heavily skewed towards development and implementation projects that are computer-related.

Noor, [...]

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In Waltzing With Bears (a book on IT project risk management, not a manual for circuses), Lister and DeMarco describe the benefits of running IT projects as a portfolio. Not every one of them would have to succeed: you could take on several very high-risk (but high-payoff) projects and balance it with several low risk [...]

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I don’t think that I am going out on a limb when I say that short time horizons of project managers, sponsors and planners is the leading cause to the disastrous failure rate of IT projects… As Michelle says, “you want a consultant whose current capability at least equals that called for by the entire project, not just the time span of the planning phase.”"

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You wouldn’t think that books dicussing agronomics would have much to say relevant to Organizational Structure, IT Management or Knowledge Management. You’d be wrong, of course, but you can see how people would think that. I’d like to show how some of the ideas being debated in the agricultural industry’s fringes can illuminate our own [...]

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Since IT projects are particularly prone to ignoring risk and escalation of commitment, reviewing some of the research on how we make decisions will benefit any IT manager or PM.

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There is a large body of work dealing with the escalation of commitment in IT projects, how managers continue to throw good money after bad, increasing their commitment to a project that has little chance of succeeding. For example, Gustavo Dimello has an interesting summary (“To Pull or Not To Pull the Plug: When Managers [...]

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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.

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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 [...]

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