so that's interesting; i recall having a conversation recently with somebody about their timesheets; how they basically have to lie on them because the actual time it takes to do things is unacceptable to the organization…
…like you have to bill a certain number of hours but you can't go over budget, and you can't log the hours as non-billable or you get in trouble, so you just don't log the hours

…and everybody does this, and then this data gets fed into pricing/costing estimates
…so the business trudges forward using known-bad data about how long it takes to do things and how much it costs, foisting this situation on the people who actually have to do the work, who are coerced into supplying the system with more bad data
so many processes in the quaternary economy are information-getting/processing, and so many of those reduce to processing the information generated from a previous process
you put it together and you get a path-dependent process capable of increasing its own scope
management is interested in when these processes terminate (and do so successfully) but it is not safe to assume they will terminate anywhere around the mean (or the median, or the mode!) especially if the inputs are bad
in other words it is perfectly legitimate to use mean-variance estimates for costing a process when you can be confident that process can be modeled with a normal distribution; it is however not legitimate to assume all processes are normally-distributed
(oh and of course it helps if your data isn't garbage)
You can follow @doriantaylor.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled:

By continuing to use the site, you are consenting to the use of cookies as explained in our Cookie Policy to improve your experience.