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Pre-mortem
A pre-mortem, or premortem, is a managerial strategy in which a project team imagines that a project or organization has failed, and then works backward to determine what potentially could lead to the failure of the project or organization. The technique breaks possible groupthinking by facilitating a positive discussion on threats, increasing the likelihood the main threats are identified. Management can then reduce the chances of failure due to heuristics and biases such as overconfidence and planning fallacy by analyzing the magnitude and likelihood of each threat, and take preventive actions to protect the project or organization from suffering an untimely "death". It formalizes and expands on the acknowledgedly much older concept of prospective hindsight (Mitchell, Russo, and Pennington 1989) in which participants "look back from the future" to identify problems before they occur. According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2007, "unlike a typical critiquing session, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Postmortem Documentation
A project post-mortem is a process used to identify the causes of a project failure (or significant business-impairing downtime), and how to prevent them in the future. This is different from a Retrospective, in which both positive and negative things are reviewed for a project. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) refers to the process as lessons learned. Project post-mortems are intended to inform process improvements which mitigate future risks and to promote iterative best practices. Post-mortems are often considered a key component of, and ongoing precursor to, effective risk management. Elements of a project post-mortem Post-mortems can encompass both quantitative data and qualitative data. Quantitative data include the variance between the hours estimated for a project and the actual hours incurred. Qualitative data will often include stakeholder satisfaction, end-user satisfaction, team satisfaction, potential reusability and perceived quality of end-deliverable ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Management
Management (or managing) is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or a Government agency, government bodies through business administration, Nonprofit studies, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administration respectively. It is the process of managing the resources of businesses, governments, and other organizations. Larger organizations generally have three Hierarchy, hierarchical levels of managers, organized in a pyramid structure: * Senior management roles include the board of directors and a chief executive officer (CEO) or a President (corporate title), president of an organization. They set the strategic goals and policy of the organization and make decisions on how the overall organization will operate. Senior managers are generally executive-level professionals who provide direction to middle management. Compare governance. * Middle management roles include branch managers, regional managers, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Groupthink
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs. This causes the group to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation. Groupthink is a construct of social psychology but has an extensive reach and influences literature in the fields of communication studies, political science, management, and organizational theory, as well as important aspects of deviant religious cult behaviour. Overview Groupthink is sometimes stated to occur (more broadly) within natural groups within the community, for example to explain the lifelong different mindsets of those with differing political views (such as "conservatism" and "liberalism" in the U.S. political context or the purported benefits of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heuristics In Judgment And Decision-making
Heuristics (from Ancient Greek language, Ancient Greek wikt:εὑρίσκω, εὑρίσκω, ''heurískō'', "I find, discover") is the process by which humans use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions. Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals, organizations, and even machines use to quickly form judgments, Decision-making, make decisions, and Problem solving, find solutions to complex problems. Often this involves focusing on the most relevant aspects of a problem or situation to formulate a solution. While heuristic processes are used to find the answers and solutions that are ''most'' likely to work or be correct, they are not always right or the most accurate. Judgments and decisions based on heuristics are simply good enough to satisfy a pressing need in situations of uncertainty, where information is incomplete. In that sense they can differ from answers given by logic and probability. The economist and cognitive psychologist Herbert A. Simon introduced the co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cognitive Bias
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm (philosophy), norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the Objectivity (philosophy), objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality. While cognitive biases may initially appear to be negative, some are adaptive. They may lead to more effective actions in a given context. Furthermore, allowing cognitive biases enables faster decisions which can be desirable when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in Heuristic (psychology), heuristics. Other cognitive biases are a "by-product" of human processing limitations, resulting from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality), the impact of an individual's constitution and bi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Overconfidence Effect
The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person's subjective ''confidence'' in their judgments is reliably greater than the objective ''accuracy'' of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high. Overconfidence is one example of a miscalibration of subjective probabilities. Throughout the research literature, overconfidence has been defined in three distinct ways: (1) ''overestimation'' of one's actual performance; (2) ''overplacement'' of one's performance relative to others; and (3) ''overprecision'' in expressing unwarranted certainty in the accuracy of one's beliefs. The most common way in which overconfidence has been studied is by asking people how confident they are of specific beliefs they hold or answers they provide. The data show that confidence systematically exceeds accuracy, implying people are more sure that they are correct than they deserve to be. If human confidence had perfect calibration, judgments with 100% confidence w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Planning Fallacy
The planning fallacy is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed. This phenomenon sometimes occurs regardless of the individual's knowledge that past tasks of a similar nature have taken longer to complete than generally planned. The bias affects predictions only about one's own tasks. On the other hand, when outside observers predict task completion times, they tend to exhibit a pessimistic bias, overestimating the time needed. The planning fallacy involves estimates of task completion times more optimistic than those encountered in similar projects in the past. The planning fallacy was first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. In 2003, Lovallo and Kahneman proposed an expanded definition as the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits of the same actions. According to this de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harvard Business Review
''Harvard Business Review'' (''HBR'') is a general management magazine published by Harvard Business Publishing, a not-for-profit, independent corporation that is an affiliate of Harvard Business School. ''HBR'' is published six times a year and is headquartered in Brighton, Massachusetts. ''HBR'' covers a wide range of topics that are relevant to various industries, management functions, and geographic locations. These include leadership, negotiation, strategy, operations, marketing, and finance. ''Harvard Business Review'' has published articles by Clayton Christensen, Peter F. Drucker, Justin Fox, Michael E. Porter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, John Hagel III, Thomas H. Davenport, Gary Hamel, C. K. Prahalad, Vijay Govindarajan, Robert S. Kaplan, Rita Gunther McGrath and others. Several management concepts and business terms were first given prominence in ''HBR''. ''Harvard Business Review''s worldwide English-language circulation is 250,000. HBR licenses its content for pub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kickoff Meeting
A kickoff meeting is the first meeting with the project team and with or without the client of the project. This meeting would follow definition of the base elements for the project and other project planning activities. This meeting introduces the members of the project team and the client and provides the opportunity to discuss the role of team members. Other base elements in the project that involve the client may also be discussed at this meeting (schedule, status reporting, etc.). If there are any new team members, the process to be followed is explained so as to maintain quality standards of the organization. Clarity is given by the project lead if there exists any ambiguity in the process implementations. There is a special discussion on the legalities involved in the project. For example, the design team interacting with the testing team may want a car to be tested on city roads. If the legal permissions are not mentioned by the concerned stakeholder during kickoff, th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
