Rol Fessenden made the following interesting points:
>My approach to resolving this is to keep the mix of activities in front of
>people so they understand the larger context. It is easy for management
>to pick out a failure, and indict it. To prevent that, we keep a mix of
>6-8 tasks publicly in front of management pretty much at all times.
>Usually a couple of these are guaranteed successes, and we keep them near
>completion so we can call in our chips when we need to.
>
>As time goes on, we mix in successes and failures, keeping the whole mix
>in front of everyone. This creates an environment in which management can
>easily see that the successes more than pay for the failures, and
>therefore, they condone ongoing experimentation.
I saw someone from MIT (think his name was Ben Ball) speak the
other day on Portfolio Management - 'Managing on the Efficient
Frontier'. He used probabilty theory and mathematics to show how
you reduced overall risk by including more risky options in your
portfolio. He has written papers on this which I don't have details
but could get if people wanted them. I found it fascinating -
particularly as I linked his input to my understanding of Deming
and the need to optimise the system.
It seems to me that Rol is using a similar theory viscerally.
-- Julie Beedon VISTA Consulting - for a better future julie@vistabee.win-uk.net