Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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From Data Hoarding to Information Sharing
 
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Good-Enough Stategies for Agile Courses into an Uncertain Future

ACM News Service: Shaping the Future.  Steven Popper, Steven Bankes, and Robert Lempert expand on their Pardee Center work on decision making in the face of complexity and uncertainty.  The proposed strategies apply the same principles that individuals do in coming up with approaches that can be refined and corrected as the target is approached and more questions are resolved (along with arrival of the inevitable new questions).  The decision process involves agreement on a near-term course that is consistent will the likely futures.  This is in contrast with requiring agreement on which future is the expected or desired one.

This time the work is presented in the 2005 April Scientific American issue.  The discussion is pretty accessible.  The team's 2003 report, "Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Long-Term Policy Analysis" can be ordered in print form or downloaded in a free set of 12 PDF files.

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I just had the weird thought that this might provide a framework for IT project risk management and future-proofing, too.  I remember being asked by an organization's director why he needed software architects (this was in 1972).  I replied that it was a way of ensuring that his options were kept open.  Now I would add, "while moving ahead, delivering results, and gaining only what experience can provide."  What we didn't do then was apply any risk management methodology, and we made the delivery chunks too big among other sins.  We achieved the hindsight-predictable result.

posted by orcmid at 4/16/2005 07:27:33 PM