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title, tags
| title | tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| _How to Measure Anything in Project Management_ |
|
How to Measure Anything in Project Management
Review
I think it is fair to say that HtMAiPM is mostly unoriginal, being in large part a rehash of ideas presented in hubbard_2020_failure and earlier in How to Measure Anything.1
This is not a criticism, the benefit of HtMAiPM is its accessibility. Where TFoRM and HtMA use appropriately ambiguous terminology and examples from varied fields that would benefit from their recommendations, HtMAiPM is explicitly for project managers, and uses examples
Many of my criticisms of TFoRM (most presented in the-failure-of-risk-management) still apply.
Praise
Accessibility and Recommendability
It is possible to get the same takeaways from HtMAiPM as from the earlier TFoRM, but to translate risk management terminology to project management requires continuous mental effort and an intuition developed without help from Hubbard. As much as I appreciate when researchers present findings with specialty-neutral language so as to not imply their use should be limited to any one field, I acknowledge that my patience in that regard is uncommon.
It is much easier to recommend HtMAiPM to my peers. I should think they would be more likely to take me up on it too, but it is difficult to say due to the zero product property.
Criticism
Conflict of Interest
If I have any hesitation about recommending Hubbard's books its that sections frequently read like advertisements.
It is worse in HtMAiPM than TFoRM
because coauthor, one of the coauthors,
has some stake in Oxford something,
a paid (for profit?) repository of project data
intended for use in reference class forecasting,
a method frequently lauded by the text.
I appreciate that it's usually impossible for these authors to give impartial recommendations considering we're talking about innovators (they can hardly recommend the services of competitors that don't exist yet), but they could have done more to get ahead of the apparent bias.
Estimator Calibration
As Hubbard explains in TFoRM and HtMAiPM reaffirms, when Hubbard first began offering calibration training there were no comparable services available. In this history both books establish and credit Hubbard as the pioneer of calibration in business risk management.
Seemingly in contradiction, HtMAiPM implies in examples of project losses not just that organizations would have avoided loss by implementing calibration training programs, but that they were negligent in their failure to do so.
Regardless of whether calibration training for risk management is interpreted as daniel-kahneman's invention or Hubbard's, the technique is new enough that its use ought to be the rarity, not its absence.
Also frustrating, in a book all about the necessity of objective measurement, the term "calibrated" is not explicitly defined. Worse, interpretation from context gives "100% accurate plus or minus a little".
In evidence of #Conflict of Interest one would expect that a man selling calibration training would write in this way: Creating FOMO for his services and allowing him to interpret individual calibration as favors him.
Scratch
???
[!quote] Chapter 4, "Exploration vs. Exploitation" The analogy of this to project planning is that we can keep trying to design better solutions to a problem before we commit to it.
Project Options
[!quote] Chapter 4, "Choosing How to Run the Project" When a project is proposed for budget approval, planners must include a list of additions and reductions... If the project runs out of budget, then deliverables will be removed from the scope.
This is different from alternates, which are only considered at the time of award.
Value of Information
Chapter 4, "How Models Indicate What to Measure"
Expected value of sample information
Estimating Impact Under Uncertainty
[!quote] Chapter 5, "Simple Tools for Measuring Uncertainty and Risk" There is such a rule, and it is called the "record-breaking probability." It is simply
1/(1+n)wherenis the number of observations resulting in the various outcomes.
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I have not read HtMA, Hubbard et al frequently state explicitly that a topic introduced in HtMAiPM was covered previously. ↩︎