This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Friday, July 08, 2005
Predicting Uncertain Futures Redux -- In a recent "blogversation" with Tim at Cutting Through, the theme has shifted from simple formulas to accounting for potential variation in promise making. Tim (whose site seems to be either broken or slow in loading this week) pointed to a graphic from a Bank of England PDF that replaces a future trend line with a future trend area, appropriately spreading out the range of possibilities the further one tries to look in the future.
A couple years ago, I offered up a similar graphic; one often seen on TV on the east coast of the US from July to November - hurricane season. The accompanying text in that post goes on to talk about the visible buffers of critical chain schedules as a means of communicating such variation.
Tim also bemoans the nature of traditional Gantt charts that don't seem to allow one to take into account the probability associated with schedule variation. And again, buffered critical chain schedules to the rescue. If the tasks estimates that go into the scheduling process reflect 50% confidence and 90% confidence, the CC buffer will approximate a similar range of probability for the collection of dependent tasks whose promise it is predicting or protecting. As much as I would prefer to live in the world of network diagrams and buffer charts, Gantt charts with buffers can be good enough.
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