Marine Sgt. at New Orleans, La. By Howard R.Hollem. Library of Congress collection via Flickr.

Why We Over-Estimate In Evaluations

Forrest ChristianManaging, Reviews - Articles 3 Comments

While at the PeopleFit “Assessing Raw Talent” class this last week, I heard that it is common for people to overestimate the CIP (Elliott Jaques’s idea of Complexity of Information Processing) of persons who have a lower CIP and to underestimate their subordinates who have a higher CIP than they do. I figured that they were simply a 2002 article …

CIP and Representative vs Direct Democracy

Forrest ChristianTheory Leave a Comment

I’ll be posting some random, unsubstantiated thoughts after the great PeopleFit course in Raleigh last week. If CIP is real, then having a representative democracy (like the United States and Canada both do) is superior to direct democracy. The people are capable of choosing the biggest leader, even if he or she is much bigger than they are. Of course, …

Bubbles atop freshly brewed coffee in a french press. (c) Salimfadhley (CC BY SA 3.0)

PeopleFit’s Course on “Assessing Raw Talent”

Forrest ChristianEvents, Theory 1 Comment

So, I returned from the PeopleFit course on how to assess raw talent through CIP evaluations. Wow. What a great class. Hands down the best course that I have ever attended. I’ll be unpacking the various things I learned, including how much I got from the other people in the class over the next few days. There are several things, …

ADLER typewriter Model n°7 (Frankfurt / Germany). Unknown model date (probably ~1930/40). By Dake

Tata Sons’ Complexity Diagram

Forrest ChristianOrganizations Leave a Comment

I went ahead and read some more of the Tata Sons material on their implementation of Billis’s (Rowbottom’s & Billis’s?) Work Levels. They use a two dimensional model to measure the level of work done within a company (see page two of the interview with Exec. Dir. R. Gopalakrishnan; the diagram is down the page). “Management Scope” goes up the …

Some Change Management articles

Forrest ChristianProject Management Leave a Comment

When I did the work for CSC, I boned up on these issues because I knew absolutely nothing. I actually read all of this so that I could put together a working change control process for the IT environment. Really. I could have simply made the guess without reading and would have produced the same process. But this was pretty …

Bibliography of articles on project risk management and escalation of commitment

Forrest ChristianReviews - Articles, Risk Management Leave a Comment

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.

Start with opinions

Forrest ChristianProject Management 1 Comment

I hope that this citation is correct. I think this comes from Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive (1967): Most books on decision making tell the reader: “First find the facts.” But executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.

Employees at Mid-Continent Refinery [ca. 1943 Tulsa, OK (LOC). By John Vachon]

Communities of Practice and Management Hierarchy: Can it work?

Forrest ChristianKnowledge, Reviews - Articles 6 Comments

In this blog post from 2004, I muse on the interaction between the network forms of Communities of Practice and managerial hierarchies (cascades of Real Bosses, not simply organizational charts). I wonder if now, years later, this is still valid. Let me know what you think. How do Communities of Practice (CoP) interact with the self-organizing principles that Elliott Jaques …