Project management is always guaranteed to bring out some strong opinions, and a recent Twitter discussion was no different – but, while the core discussion on Twitter was great, it really deserves a much longer-form treatment. Paul Johnston wrote up his thoughts about getting people to talk about predictions instead of deadlines – and much of it is hard to argue with, but I have a bit of a different perspective.
Category: forecasting (Page 2 of 2)
This is not a post about Brexit; this is about conversations. Storytelling rose in the 80’s as a key marketing tool – phenomena like the Nescafe “Gold Blend” adverts demonstrated how the ability to tell a story could convincingly engage consumers en masse. Truth be told, this was nothing new – the “soap opera” is so-called because those ongoing serial dramas used to be sponsored by soap manufacturers. But, the key insight by the storytellers was that creating a story around a message you wanted to communicate (rather than simply being associated to or referenced by the story) was very powerful.
Having droned on a little the other day about duplication in Stackanetes (in hindsight, I had intended to make a “it’s turtles all the way down” type jibe), I’ve been delighted to read lots of other people spouting the same opinion – nothing quite so gratifying as confirmation bias.
Massimo has it absolutely right when he describes container scheduling as an incestuous orgy (actually, he didn’t, I just did, but I think that was roughly his point).
For a while now, I have been waxing lyrical (to those who will listen) about the variety of new tools and analyses available to people who want to prognosticate. If nothing else, the current craze for data within most businesses has resulted in people almost literally swimming around in the stuff without an awful lot of an idea about what to do with it, and while this has lead to some unspeakably shambolic practices (those who know me will likely have heard me on my hobby horse about proving models with actual experimentation) it has also opened up new horizons for people like me.
