# Eight to Late

Sensemaking and Analytics for Organizations

## 3 or 7, truth or trust

“It is clear that ethics cannot be articulated.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Over the last few years I’ve been teaching and refining a series of lecture-workshops on Decision Making Under Uncertainty. Audiences include data scientists and mid-level managers working in corporates and public service agencies. The course is based on the distinction between uncertainties in which the variables are known and can be quantified versus those in which the variables are not known upfront and/or are hard to quantify.

Before going any further, it is worth explaining the distinction via a couple of examples:

An example of the first type of uncertainty is project estimation. A project has an associated time and cost, and although we don’t know what their values are upfront, we can estimate them if we have the right data.  The point to note is this: because such problems can be quantified, the human brain tends to deal with them in a logical manner.

In contrast, business strategy is an example of the second kind of uncertainty. Here we do not know what the key variables are upfront. Indeed we cannot, because different stakeholders will perceive different aspects of a strategy to be paramount depending on their interests – consider, for example, the perspective of a CFO versus that of a CMO. Because of these differences, one cannot make progress on such problems until agreement has been reached on what is important to the group as a whole.  The point to note here is that since such problems involve contentious issues, our reactions to them  tend to be emotional rather than logical.

The difference between the two types of uncertainty is best conveyed experientially, so I have a few in-class activities aimed at doing just that. One of them is an exercise I call “3 or 7“, in which I give students a sheet with the following printed on it:

Circle either the number 3 or 7 below depending on whether you want 3 marks or 7 marks added to your Assignment 2 final mark. Yes, this offer is for real, but there a catch: if more than 10% of the class select 7, no one gets anything.

Write your student ID on the paper so that Kailash can award you the marks. Needless to say, your choice will remain confidential, no one (but Kailash) will know what you have selected.

3              7

Prior to handing out the sheet, I tell them that they:

• should sit far enough apart so that they can’t see what their neighbours choose,
• are not allowed to communicate their choices to others until the entire class has turned their sheets.

Before reading any further you may want to think about what typically happens.

–x–

Many readers would have recognized this exercise as a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and, indeed, many students in my classes recognize this too.   Even so, there are always enough of “win at the cost of others” types in the room who ensure that I don’t have to award any extra marks. I’ve run the exercise about 10 times, often with groups comprised of highly collaborative individuals who work well together. Despite that,15-20% of the class ends up opting for 7.

It never fails to surprise me that, even in relatively close-knit groups, there are invariably a number of individuals who, if given a chance to gain at the expense of their colleagues, will not hesitate to do so providing their anonymity is ensured.

–x–

Conventional management thinking deems that any organisational activity involving several people has to be closely supervised. Underlying this view is the assumption that individuals involved in the activity will, if left unsupervised, make decisions based on self-interest rather than the common good (as happens in the prisoner’s dilemma game). This assumption finds justification in rational choice theory, which predicts that individuals will act in ways that maximise their personal benefit without any regard to the common good. This view is exemplified in 3 or 7 and, at a societal level, in the so-called Tragedy of the Commons, where individuals who have access to a common resource over-exploit it,  thus depleting the resource entirely.

Fortunately, such a scenario need not come to pass: the work of Elinor Ostrom, one of the 2009 Nobel prize winners for Economics, shows that, given the right conditions, groups can work towards the common good even if it means forgoing personal gains.

Classical economics assumes that individuals’ actions are driven by rational self-interest – i.e. the well-known “what’s in it for me” factor. Clearly, the group will achieve much better results as a whole if it were to exploit the resource in a cooperative way. There are several real-world examples where such cooperative behaviour has been successful in achieving outcomes for the common good (this paper touches on some). However, according to classical economic theory, such cooperative behaviour is simply not possible.

So the question is: what’s wrong with rational choice theory?  A couple of things, at least:

Firstly, implicit in rational choice theory is the assumption that individuals can figure out the best choice in any given situation.  This is obviously incorrect. As Ostrom has stated in one of her papers:

Because individuals are boundedly rational, they do not calculate a complete set of strategies for every situation they face. Few situations in life generate information about all potential actions that one can take, all outcomes that can be obtained, and all strategies that others can take.

Instead, they use heuristics (experienced-based methods), norms (value-based techniques) and rules (mutually agreed regulations) to arrive at “good enough” decisions.  Note that Ostrom makes a distinction between norms and rules, the former being implicit (unstated) rules, which are determined by the cultural attitudes and values)

Secondly, rational choice theory assumes that humans behave as self-centred, short-term maximisers. Such theories work in competitive situations such as the stock-market but not in situations in which collective action is called for, such as the prisoners dilemma.

Ostrom’s work essentially addresses the limitations of rational choice theory by outlining how individuals can work together to overcome self-interest.

–x–

In a paper entitled, A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action, published in 1998, Ostrom states that:

…much of our current public policy analysis is based on an assumption that rational individuals are helplessly trapped in social dilemmas from which they cannot extract themselves without inducement or sanctions applied from the outside. Many policies based on this assumption have been subject to major failure and have exacerbated the very problems they were intended to ameliorate. Policies based on the assumptions that individuals can learn how to devise well-tailored rules and cooperate conditionally when they participate in the design of institutions affecting them are more successful in the field…[Note:  see this book by Baland and Platteau, for example]

Since rational choice theory aims to maximise individual gain,  it does not work in situations that demand collective action – and Ostrom presents some very general evidence to back this claim.  More interesting than the refutation of rational choice theory, though, is Ostrom’s discussion of the ways in which individuals “trapped” in social dilemmas end up making the right choices. In particular she singles out two empirically grounded ways in which individuals work towards outcomes that are much better than those offered by rational choice theory. These are:

Communication: In the rational view, communication makes no difference to the outcome.  That is, even if individuals make promises and commitments to each other (through communication), they will invariably break these for the sake of personal gain …or so the theory goes. In real life, however, it has been found that opportunities for communication significantly raise the cooperation rate in collective efforts (see this paper abstract or this one, for example). Moreover, research shows that face-to-face is far superior to any other form of communication, and that the main benefit achieved through communication is exchanging mutual commitment (“I promise to do this if you’ll promise to do that”) and increasing trust between individuals. It is interesting that the main role of communication is to enhance or reinforce the relationship between individuals rather than to transfer information.  This is in line with the interactional theory of communication.

Innovative Governance:  Communication by itself may not be enough; there must be consequences for those who break promises and commitments. Accordingly, cooperation can be encouraged by implementing mutually accepted rules for individual conduct, and imposing sanctions on those who violate them. This effectively amounts to designing and implementing novel governance structures for the activity. Note that this must be done by the group; rules thrust upon the group by an external authority are unlikely to work.

Of course, these factors do not come into play in artificially constrained and time-bound scenarios like 3 or 7.  In such situations, there is no opportunity or time to communicate or set up governance structures. What is clear, even from the simple 3 or 7 exercise,  is that these are required even for groups that appear to be close-knit.

Ostrom also identifies three core relationships that promote cooperation. These are:

Reciprocity: this refers to a family of strategies that are based on the expectation that people will respond to each other in kind – i.e. that they will do unto others as others do unto them.  In group situations, reciprocity can be a very effective means to promote and sustain cooperative behaviour.

Reputation: This refers to the general view of others towards a person. As such, reputation is a part of how others perceive a person, so it forms a part of the identity of the person in question. In situations demanding collective action, people might make judgements on a person’s reliability and trustworthiness based on his or her reputation.’

Trust: Trust refers to expectations regarding others’ responses in situations where one has to act before others. And if you think about it, everything else in Ostrom’s framework is ultimately aimed at engendering or – if that doesn’t work – enforcing trust.

–x—

In an article on ethics and second-order cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster tells the following story:

I have a dear friend who grew up in Marrakech. The house of his family stood on the street that divide the Jewish and the Arabic quarter. As a boy he played with all the others, listened to what they thought and said, and learned of their fundamentally different views. When I asked him once, “Who was right?” he said, “They are both right.”

“But this cannot be,” I argued from an Aristotelian platform, “Only one of them can have the truth!”

“The problem is not truth,” he answered, “The problem is trust.”

For me, that last line summarises the lesson implicit in the admittedly artificial scenario of 3 or 7. In our search for facts and decision-making frameworks we forget the simple truth that in many real-life dilemmas they matter less than we think. Facts and  frameworks cannot help us decide on ambiguous matters in which the outcome depends on what other people do.  In such cases the problem is not truth; the problem is trust.  From your own experience it should be evident it is impossible convince others of your trustworthiness by assertion, the only way to do so is by behaving in a trustworthy way. That is, by behaving ethically rather than talking about it, a point that is squarely missed by so-called business ethics classes.

Yes,  it is clear that ethics cannot be articulated.

Notes:

1. Portions of this article are lightly edited sections from a 2009 article that I wrote on Ostrom’s work and its relevance to project management.
2.  Finally, an unrelated but important matter for which I seek your support for a common good: I’m taking on the 7 Bridges Walk to help those affected by cancer. Please donate via my 7 Bridges fundraising page if you can . Every dollar counts; all funds raised will help Cancer Council work towards the vision of a cancer free future.

Written by K

September 18, 2019 at 8:28 pm

## Seven Bridges revisited – further reflections on the map and the territory

The  Seven Bridges Walk is an annual fitness and fund-raising event organised by the Cancer Council of New South Wales. The picturesque 28 km circuit weaves its way through a number of waterfront suburbs around Sydney Harbour and takes in some spectacular views along the way.  My friend John and I did the walk for the first time in 2017. Apart from thoroughly enjoying the experience, there was  another, somewhat unexpected payoff: the walk evoked some thoughts on project management and the map-territory relationship which I subsequently wrote up in a post on this blog.

Figure 1:The map, the plan

We enjoyed the walk so much that we decided to do it again in 2018. Now, it is a truism that one cannot travel exactly the same road twice. However, much is made of the repeatability of certain kinds of experiences. For example, the discipline of project management is largely predicated on the assumption that projects are repeatable.  I thought it would be interesting to see how this plays out in the case of a walk along a well-defined route, not the least because it is in many ways akin to a repeatable project.

To begin with, it is easy enough to compare the weather conditions on the two days: 29 Oct 2017 and 28 Oct 2018. A quick browse of this site gave me the data as I was after (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Weather on 29 Oct 2017 and 28 Oct 2018

The data supports our subjective experience of the two walks. The conditions in 2017 were less than ideal for walking: clear and uncomfortably warm with a hot breeze from the north.  2018 was considerably better: cool and overcast with a gusty south wind – in other words, perfect walking weather. Indeed, one of the things we commented on the second time around was how much more pleasant it was.

But although weather conditions matter, they tell but a part of the story.

On the first walk, I took a number of photographs at various points along the way. I thought it would be interesting to take photographs at the same spots, at roughly the same time as I did the last time around, and compare how things looked a year on. In the next few paragraphs I show a few of these side by side (2017 left, 2018 right) along with some comments.

We started from Hunters Hill at about 7:45 am as we did on our first foray, and took our first photographs at Fig Tree Bridge, about a kilometre from the starting point.

Figure 3: Lane Cove River from Fig Tree Bridge (2017 Left, 2018 Right)

The purple Jacaranda that captivated us in 2017 looks considerably less attractive the second time around (Figure 3): the tree is yet to flower and what little there is there does not show well in the cloud-diffused light. Moreover, the scaffolding and roof covers on the building make for a much less attractive picture. Indeed, had the scene looked so the first time around, it is unlikely we would have considered it worthy of a photograph.

The next shot (Figure 4), taken not more than a  hundred metres from the previous one, also looks considerably different:  rougher waters and no kayakers in the foreground. Too cold and windy, perhaps?  The weather and wind data in Fig 2 would seem to support that conclusion.

Figure 4: Morning kayakers on the river (2017 Left, 2018 Right)

The photographs in Figure 5 were taken at Pyrmont Bridge  about four hours into the walk. We already know from Figure 4 that it was considerably windier in 2018. A comparison of the flags in the two shots in Figure 5 reveal an additional detail: the wind was from opposite directions in the two years. This is confirmed by the weather information in Figure 2, which also tells us that the wind was from the north in 2017 and the south the following year (which explains the cooler conditions).  We can even get an  approximate temperature: the photographs were taken around 11:30 am both years, and a quick look at Figure 2 reveals that the temperature at noon was about 30 C in 2017 and 18 C in 2018.

Figure 5: Pyrmont Bridge (2017 Left, 2018 Right)

The point about the wind direction and cloud conditions is also confirmed by comparing the photographs in Figure 6, taken at Anzac Bridge, a few kilometres further along the way (see the direction of the flag atop the pylon).

Figure 6: View looking up Anzac Bridge (2017 L, 2018 R)

Skipping over to the final section of the walk, here are a couple of shots I took towards the end: Figure 7 shows a view from Gladesville Bridge and Figure 8 shows one from Tarban Creek Bridge.  Taken together the two confirm some of the things we’ve already noted regarding the weather and conditions for photography.

Figure 7: View from Gladesville Bridge (2017 L, 2018 R)

Further, if you look closely at Figures 7 and 8, you will also see the differences in the flowering stage of the Jacaranda.

Figure 8: View from Tarban Creek Bridge (2017 L, 2018 R)

A detail that I did not notice until John pointed it out is that the the boat at the bottom edge of  both photographs in Fig. 8 is the same one (note the colour of the furled sail)! This was surprising to us, but it should not have been so.  It turns out that boat owners have to apply for private mooring licenses and are allocated positions at which they install a suitable mooring apparatus. Although this is common knowledge for boat owners, it likely isn’t so for others.

The photographs are a visual record of some of the things we encountered  along the way. However, the details in recorded in them have more to do with aesthetics rather the experience – in photography of this kind, one tends to preference what looks good over what happened. Sure, some of the photographs offer hints about the experience but much of this is incidental and indirect. For example,  when taking the photographs in Figures 5 and 6, it was certainly not my intention to record the wind direction. Indeed, that would have been a highly convoluted way to convey information that is directly and more accurately described by the data in Figure 2 . That said, even data has limitations: it can help fill in details such as the wind direction and temperature but it does not evoke any sense of what it was like to be there, to experience the experience, so to speak.

Neither data nor photographs are the stuff memories are made of. For that one must look elsewhere.

–x–

As Heraclitus famously said, one can never step into the same river twice. So it is with walks.  Every experience of a walk is unique; although map remains the same the territory is invariably different on each traverse, even if only subtly so. Indeed, one could say that the territory is defined through one’s experience of it. That experience is not reproducible, there are always differences in the details.

As John Salvatier points out, reality has a surprising amount of detail, much of which we miss because we look but do not see. Seeing entails a deliberate focus on minutiae such as the play of morning light on the river or tree; the cool damp from last night’s rain; changes in the built environment, some obvious, others less so.  Walks are made memorable by precisely such details, but paradoxically  these can be hard to record in a meaningful way.  Factual (aka data-driven) descriptions end up being laundry lists that inevitably miss the things that make the experience memorable.

Poets do a better job. Consider, for instance, Tennyson‘s take on a brook:

“…I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret
By many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set
With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever….”

One can almost see and hear a brook. Not Tennyson’s, but one’s own version of it.

Evocative descriptions aren’t the preserve of poets alone. Consider the following description of Sydney Harbour, taken from DH Lawrence‘s Kangaroo:

“…He took himself off to the gardens to eat his custard apple-a pudding inside a knobbly green skin-and to relax into the magic ease of the afternoon. The warm sun, the big, blue harbour with its hidden bays, the palm trees, the ferry steamers sliding flatly, the perky birds, the inevitable shabby-looking, loafing sort of men strolling across the green slopes, past the red poinsettia bush, under the big flame-tree, under the blue, blue sky-Australian Sydney with a magic like sleep, like sweet, soft sleep-a vast, endless, sun-hot, afternoon sleep with the world a mirage. He could taste it all in the soft, sweet, creamy custard apple. A wonderful sweet place to drift in….”

Written in 1923, it remains a brilliant evocation of the Harbour even today.

Tennyson’s brook and Lawrence’s Sydney do a better job than photographs or factual description, even though the latter are considered more accurate and objective. Why?  It is because their words are more than mere description: they are stories that convey a sense of what it is like to be there.

–x–

The two editions of the walk covered exactly the same route, but our experiences of the territory on the two instances were very different. The differences were in details that ultimately added up to the uniqueness of each experience.  These details cannot  be captured by maps and visual or written records, even in principle. So although one may gain familiarity with certain aspects of a territory through repetition, each lived experience of it will be unique. Moreover, no two individuals will experience the territory in exactly the same way.

When bidding for projects, consultancies make much of their prior experience of doing similar projects elsewhere. The truth, however, is that although two projects may look identical on paper they will invariably be different in practice.  The map,  as Korzybski famously said, is not the territory.  Even more, every encounter with the territory is different.

All this is not to say that maps (or plans or data) are useless, one needs them as orienting devices. However, one must accept that they offer limited guidance on how to deal with the day-to-day events and occurrences on a project. These tend to be unique because they are highly context dependent. The lived experience of a project is therefore necessarily different from the planned one. How can one gain insight into the former? Tennyson and Lawrence offer a hint: look to the stories told by people who have traversed the territory, rather than the maps, plans and data-driven reports they produce.

Written by K

February 15, 2019 at 8:24 am

Posted in Project Management

## A gentle introduction to Monte Carlo simulation for project managers

This article covers the why, what and how of Monte Carlo simulation using a canonical example from project management –  estimating the duration of a small project. Before starting, however, I’d like say a few words about the tool I’m going to use.

In keeping with the format of the tutorials on this blog, I’ve assumed very little prior knowledge about probability, let alone Monte Carlo simulation. Consequently, the article is verbose and the tone somewhat didactic.

### Introduction

Estimation is key part of a project manager’s role. The most frequent (and consequential) estimates they are asked deliver relate to time and cost.  Often these are calculated and presented as point estimates: i.e. single numbers – as in, this task will take 3 days. Or, a little better, as two-point ranges – as in, this task will take between 2 and 5 days.  Better still, many use a PERT-like approach wherein estimates are based on 3 points: best, most likely and worst case scenarios – as in, this task will take between 2 and 5 days, but it’s most likely that we’ll finish on day 3.  We’ll use three-point estimates as a starting point for Monte Carlo simulation, but first, some relevant background.

It is a truism, well borne out by experience, that it is easier to estimate small, simple tasks than large, complex ones. Indeed, this is why one of the early to-dos in a project is the construction of a work breakdown structure. However, a problem arises when one combines the estimates for individual elements into an overall estimate for a project or a phase thereof. It is that a straightforward addition of individual estimates or bounds will almost always lead to a grossly incorrect estimation of overall time or cost. The reason for this is simple: estimates are necessarily based on probabilities and probabilities do not combine additively. Monte Carlo simulation provides a principled and intuitive way to obtain probabilistic estimates at the level of an entire project based on estimates of the individual tasks that comprise it.

### The problem

The best way to explain Monte Carlo is through a simple worked example. So, let’s consider a 4 task project shown in Figure 1. In the project, the second task is dependent on the first, and third and fourth are dependent on the second but not on each other. The upshot of this is that the first two tasks have to be performed sequentially and the last two can be done at the same time, but can only be started after the second task is completed.

To summarise: the first two tasks must be done in series and the last two can be done in parallel.

Figure 1; A project with 4 tasks.

Figure 1 also shows the three point estimates for each task – that is the minimum, maximum and most likely completion times. For completeness I’ve listed them below:

• Task 1 – Min: 2 days; Most Likely: 4 days; Max: 8 days
• Task 2 – Min: 3 days; Most Likely: 5 days; Max: 10 days
• Task 3 – Min: 3 days; Most Likely: 6 days; Max: 9 days
• Task 4 – Min: 2 days; Most Likely: 4 days; Max: 7 days

OK, so that’s the situation as it is given to us. The first step to  developing  an estimate is to formulate the problem in a way that it can be tackled using Monte Carlo simulation. This bring us to the important topic of the shape of uncertainty aka probability distributions.

### The shape of uncertainty

Consider the data for Task 1. You have been told that it most often finishes on day 4.  However, if things go well, it could take as little as 2 days; but if things go badly it could take as long as 8 days.  Therefore, your range of possible finish times (outcomes) is between 2 to 8 days.

Clearly, each of these outcomes is not equally likely.  The most likely outcome is that you will finish the task in 4 days (from what your team member has told you). Moreover, the likelihood of finishing in less than 2 days or more than 8 days is zero. If we plot the likelihood of completion against completion time, it would look something like Figure 2.

Figure 2: Likelihood of finishing on day 2, day 4 and day 8.

Figure 2 begs a couple of questions:

1. What are the relative likelihoods of completion for all intermediate times – i.e. those between 2 to 4 days and 4 to 8 days?
2. How can one quantify the likelihood of intermediate times? In other words, how can one get a numerical value of the likelihood for all times between 2 to 8 days?  Note that we know from the earlier discussion that this must be zero for any time less than 2 or greater than 8 days.

The two questions are actually related. As we shall soon see, once we know the relative likelihood of completion at all times (compared to the maximum), we can work out its numerical value.

Since we don’t know anything about intermediate times (I’m assuming there is no other historical data available), the simplest thing to do is to assume that the likelihood increases linearly (as a straight line) from 2 to 4 days and decreases in the same way from 4 to 8 days as shown in Figure 3. This gives us the well-known triangular distribution.

Jargon Buster: The term distribution is simply a fancy word for a plot of likelihood vs. time.

Figure 3: Triangular distribution fitted to points in Figure 1

Of course, this isn’t the only possibility; there are an infinite number of others. Figure 4 is another (admittedly weird) example.

Figure 4: Another distribution that fits the points in Figure 2.

Further, it is quite possible that the upper limit (8 days) is not a hard one. It may be that in exceptional cases the task could take much longer (for example, if your team member calls in sick for two weeks) or even not be completed at all (for example, if she then leaves for that mythical greener pasture).  Catering for the latter possibility, the shape of the likelihood might resemble Figure 5.

Figure 5: A distribution that allows for a very long (potentially) infinite completion time

The main takeaway from the above is that uncertainties should be expressed as shapes rather than numbers, a notion popularised by Sam Savage in his book, The Flaw of Averages.

[Aside:  you may have noticed that all the distributions shown above are skewed to the right – that  is they have a long tail. This is a general feature of distributions that describe time (or cost) of project tasks. It would take me too far afield to discuss why this is so, but if you’re interested you may want to check out my post on the inherent uncertainty of project task estimates.

### From likelihood to probability

Thus far, I have used the word “likelihood” without bothering to define it.  It’s time to make the notion more precise.  I’ll begin by asking the question: what common sense properties do we expect a quantitative measure of likelihood to have?

Consider the following:

1. If an event is impossible, its likelihood should be zero.
2. The sum of likelihoods of all possible events should equal complete certainty. That is, it should be a constant. As this constant can be anything, let us define it to be 1.

In terms of the example above, if we denote time by $t$ and the likelihood by $P(t)$  then:

$P(t) = 0$ for $t< 2$ and  $t> 8$

And

$\sum_{t}P(t) = 1$ where $2\leq t< 8$

Where $\sum_{t}$ denotes the sum of all non-zero likelihoods – i.e. those that lie between 2 and 8 days. In simple terms this is the area enclosed by the likelihood curves and the x axis in figures 2 to 5.  (Technical Note:  Since $t$ is a continuous variable, this should be denoted by an integral rather than a simple sum, but this is a technicality that need not concern us here)

$P(t)$ is , in fact, what mathematicians call probability– which explains why I have used the symbol $P$ rather than $L$. Now that I’ve explained what it  is, I’ll use the word “probability” instead of ” likelihood” in the remainder of this article.

With these assumptions in hand, we can now obtain numerical values for the probability of completion for all times between 2 and 8 days. This can be figured out by noting that the area under the probability curve (the triangle in figure 3 and the weird shape in figure 4) must equal 1, and we’ll do this next.  Indeed, for the problem at hand, we’ll assume that all four task durations can be fitted to triangular distributions. This is primarily to keep things  simple. However, I should emphasise that you can use any shape so long as you can express it mathematically, and I’ll say more about this towards the end of this article.

### The triangular distribution

Let’s look at the estimate for Task 1. We have three numbers corresponding to a minimummost likely and maximum time.  To keep the discussion general, we’ll call these $t_{min}$, $t_{ml}$ and $t_{max}$ respectively, (we’ll get back to our estimator’s specific numbers later).

Now, what about the probabilities associated with each of these times?

Since $t_{min}$ and $t_{max}$ correspond to the minimum and maximum times,  the probability associated with these is zero. Why?  Because if it wasn’t zero, then there would be a non-zero probability of completion for a time less than $t_{min}$ or greater than $t_{max}$ – which isn’t possible [Note: this is a consequence of the assumption that the probability varies continuously –  so if it takes on non-zero value, $p_{0}$,  at $t_{min}$ then it must take on a value slightly less than $p_{0}$ – but greater than 0 –  at $t$ slightly smaller than $t_{min}$ ] .   As far as  the most likely time,  $t_{ml}$,  is concerned:  by definition, the probability attains its highest value at time $t_{ml}$.    So, assuming the probability can be described by a triangular function, the distribution must have the form shown in Figure 6 below.

Figure 6: Triangular distribution redux.

For the simulation, we need to know the equation describing the above distribution.  Although Wikipedia will tell us the answer in a mouse-click, it is instructive to figure it out for ourselves. First, note that the area under the triangle must be equal to  1 because the task must finish at some time between $t_{min}$ and $t_{max}$.   As a consequence we have:

$\frac{1}{2}\times{base}\times{altitude}=\frac{1}{2}\times{(t_{max}-t_{min})}\times{p(t_{ml})}=1\ldots\ldots{(1)}$

where $p(t_{ml})$ is the probability corresponding to time $t_{ml}$.  With a bit of rearranging we get,

$p(t_{ml})=\frac{2}{(t_{max}-t_{min})}\ldots\ldots(2)$

To derive the probability for any time $t$ lying between $t_{min}$ and $t_{ml}$, we note that:

$\frac{(t-t_{min})}{p(t)}=\frac{(t_{ml}-t_{min})}{p(t_{ml})}\ldots\ldots(3)$

This is a consequence of the fact that the ratios on either side of equation (3)  are  equal to the slope of the line joining the points $(t_{min},0)$ and $(t_{ml}, p(t_{ml}))$.

Figure 7

Substituting (2) in (3) and simplifying a bit, we obtain:

$p(t)=\frac{2(t-t_{min})}{(t_{ml}-t_{min})(t_{max}-t_{min})}\dots\ldots(4)$ for $t_{min}\leq t \leq t_{ml}$

In a similar fashion one can show that the probability for times lying between $t_{ml}$ and $t_{max}$ is given by:

$p(t)=\frac{2(t_{max}-t)}{(t_{max}-t_{ml})(t_{max}-t_{min})}\dots\ldots(5)$ for $t_{ml}\leq t \leq t_{max}$

Equations 4 and 5 together describe the probability distribution function (or PDF)  for all times between $t_{min}$ and $t_{max}$.

As it turns out, in Monte Carlo simulations, we don’t directly work with the probability distribution function. Instead we work with the cumulative distribution function (or CDF) which is the probability, $P$,  that the task is completed by time $t$. To reiterate, the PDF, $p(t)$, is the probability of the task finishing at time $t$ whereas the CDF, $P(t)$, is the probability of the task completing by time $t$. The CDF, $P(t)$,  is essentially a sum of all probabilities between $t_{min}$ and $t$. For $t < t_{min}$ this is the area under the triangle with apexes at   ($t_{min}$, 0), (t, 0) and (t, p(t)).  Using the formula for the area of a triangle (1/2 base times height) and equation (4) we get:

$P(t)=\frac{(t-t_{min})^2}{(t_{ml}-t_{min})(t_{max}-t_{min})}\ldots\ldots(6)$ for $t_{min}\leq t \leq t_{ml}$

Noting that for $t \geq t_{ml}$, the area under the curve equals the total area minus the area enclosed by the triangle with base between t and $t_{max}$, we have:

$P(t)=1- \frac{(t_{max}-t)^2}{(t_{max}-t_{ml})(t_{max}-t_{min})}\ldots\ldots(7)$ for $t_{ml}\leq t \leq t_{max}$

As expected,  $P(t)$  starts out with a value 0 at $t_{min}$ and then increases monotonically, attaining a value of 1 at $t_{max}$.

To end this section let’s plug in the numbers quoted by our estimator at the start of this section: $t_{min}=2$, $t_{ml}=4$ and $t_{max}=8$.  The resulting PDF and CDF are shown in figures 8 and 9.

Figure 8: PDF for triangular distribution (tmin=2, tml=4, tmax=8)

Figure 9 – CDF for triangular distribution (tmin=2, tml=4, tmax=8)

### Monte Carlo in a minute

Now with all that conceptual work done, we can get to the main topic of this post:  Monte Carlo estimation. The basic idea behind Monte Carlo is to simulate the entire project (all 4 tasks in this case) a large number N (say 10,000) times and thus obtain N overall completion times.  In each of the N trials, we simulate each of the tasks in the project and add them up appropriately to give us an overall project completion time for the trial.  The resulting N overall completion times will all be different, ranging from the sum of the minimum completion times to the sum of the maximum completion times.  In other words, we will obtain the PDF and CDF for the overall completion time, which will enable us to answer questions such as:

• How likely is it that the project will be completed within 17 days?
• What’s the estimated time for which I can be 90% certain that the project will be completed? For brevity, I’ll call this the 90% completion time in the rest of this piece.

“OK, that sounds great”, you say, “but how exactly do we simulate a single task”?

Good question, and I was just about to get to that…

### Simulating a single task using the CDF

As we saw earlier, the CDF for the triangular has a S shape and ranges from 0 to 1 in value. It turns out that the S shape is characteristic of all CDFs, regardless of the details underlying PDF. Why? Because, the cumulative probability must lie between 0 and 1 (remember, probabilities can never exceed 1, nor can they be negative).

OK, so to simulate a task, we:

• generate a random number between 0 and 1, this corresponds to the probability that the task will finish at time t.
• find the time, t, that this corresponds to this value of probability. This is the completion time for the task for this trial.

Incidentally, this method is called inverse transform sampling.

An example might help clarify how inverse transform sampling works.  Assume that the random number generated is 0.4905. From the CDF for the first task, we see that this value of probability corresponds to a completion time of 4.503 days, which is the completion for this trial (see Figure 10). Simple!

Figure 10: Illustrating inverse transform sampling

In this case we found the time directly from the computed CDF. That’s not too convenient when you’re simulating the project 10,000 times. Instead, we need a programmable math expression that gives us the time corresponding to the probability directly. This can be obtained by solving equations (6) and (7) for $t$. Some straightforward algebra, yields the following two expressions for $t$:

$t = t_{min} + \sqrt{P(t)(t_{ml} - t_{min})(t_{max} - t_{min})} \ldots\ldots(8)$ for $t_{min}\leq t \leq t_{ml}$

And

$t = t_{max} - \sqrt{[1-P(t)](t_{max} - t_{ml})(t_{max} - t_{min})} \ldots\ldots(9)$ for $t_{ml}\leq t \leq t_{max}$

These can be easily combined in a single Excel formula using an IF function, and I’ll show you exactly how in a minute. Yes, we can now finally get down to the Excel simulation proper and you may want to download the workbook if you haven’t done so already.

### The simulation

Open up the workbook and focus on the first three columns of the first sheet to begin with. These simulate the first task in Figure 1, which also happens to be the task we have used to illustrate the construction of the triangular distribution as well as the mechanics of Monte Carlo.

Rows 2 to 4 in columns A and B list the min, most likely and max completion times while the same rows in column C list the probabilities associated with each of the times. For $t_{min}$ the probability is 0 and for $t_{max}$ it is 1.  The probability at $t_{ml}$ can be calculated using equation (6) which, for $t=t_{max}$, reduces to

$P(t_{ml}) =\frac{(t_{ml}-t_{min})}{t_{max}-t_{min}}\ldots\ldots(10)$

Rows 6 through 10005 in column A are simulated probabilities of completion for Task 1. These are obtained via the Excel RAND() function, which generates uniformly distributed random numbers lying between 0 and 1.  This gives us a list of probabilities corresponding to 10,000 independent simulations of Task 1.

The 10,000 probabilities need to be translated into completion times for the task. This is done using equations (8) or (9) depending on whether the simulated probability is less or greater than $P(t_{ml})$, which is in cell C3 (and given by Equation (10) above). The conditional statement can be coded in an Excel formula using the IF() function.

Tasks 2-4 are coded in exactly the same way, with distribution parameters in rows 2 through 4 and simulation details in rows 6 through 10005 in the columns listed below:

• Task 2 – probabilities in column D; times in column F
• Task 3 – probabilities in column H; times in column I
• Task 4 – probabilities in column K; times in column L

That’s basically it for the simulation of individual tasks. Now let’s see how to combine them.

For tasks in series (Tasks 1 and 2), we simply sum the completion times for each task to get the overall completion times for the two tasks.  This is what’s shown in rows 6 through 10005 of column G.

For tasks in parallel (Tasks 3 and 4), the overall completion time is the maximum of the completion times for the two tasks. This is computed and stored in rows 6 through 10005 of column N.

Finally, the overall project completion time for each simulation is then simply the sum of columns G and N (shown in column O)

Sheets 2 and 3 are plots of the probability and cumulative probability distributions for overall project completion times. I’ll cover these in the next section.

### Discussion – probabilities and estimates

The figure on Sheet 2 of the Excel workbook (reproduced in Figure 11 below) is the probability distribution function (PDF) of completion times. The x-axis shows the elapsed time in days and the y-axis the number of Monte Carlo trials that have a completion time that lie in the relevant time bin (of width 0.5 days). As an example, for the simulation shown in the Figure 11, there were 882 trials (out of 10,000) that had a completion time that lie between 16.25 and 16.75 days. Your numbers will vary, of course, but you should have a maximum in the 16 to 17 day range and a trial number that is reasonably close to the one I got.

Figure 11: Probability distribution of completion times (N=10,000)

I’ll say a bit more about Figure 11 in the next section. For now, let’s move on to Sheet 3 of workbook which shows the cumulative probability of completion by a particular day (Figure 12 below).  The figure shows the cumulative probability function (CDF), which is the sum of all completion times from the earliest possible completion day to the particular day.

Figure 12: Probability of completion by a particular day (N=10,000)

To reiterate a point made earlier,  the reason we work with the CDF  rather than the PDF is that we are interested in knowing the probability of completion by a particular date (e.g. it is 90% likely that we will finish by April 20th) rather than the probability of completion on a particular date (e.g. there’s a 10% chance we’ll finish on April 17th). We can now answer the two questions we posed earlier. As a reminder, they are:

• How likely is it that the project will be completed within 17 days?
• What’s the 90% likely completion time?

Both questions are easily answered by using the cumulative distribution chart on Sheet 3 (or Fig 12).  Reading the relevant numbers from the chart, I see that:

• There’s a 60% chance that the project will be completed in 17 days.
• The 90% likely completion time is 19.5 days.

How does the latter compare to the sum of the 90% likely completion times for the individual tasks? The 90% likely completion time for a given task can be calculated by solving Equation 9 for $t$, with appropriate values for the parameters $t_{min}$, $t_{max}$ and $t_{ml}$ plugged in, and $P(t)$ set to 0.9. This gives the following values for the 90% likely completion times:

• Task 1 – 6.5 days
• Task 2 – 8.1 days
• Task 3 – 7.7 days
• Task 4 – 5.8 days

Summing up the first three tasks (remember, Tasks 3 and 4 are in parallel) we get a total of 22.3 days, which is clearly an overestimation. Now, with the benefit of having gone through the simulation, it is easy to see that the sum of 90% likely completion times for individual tasks does not equal the 90% likely completion time for the sum of the relevant individual tasks – the first three tasks in this particular case. Why? Essentially because a Monte Carlo run in which the first three tasks tasks take as long as their (individual) 90% likely completion times is highly unlikely. Exercise:  use the worksheet to estimate how likely this is.

There’s much more that can be learnt from the CDF. For example, it also tells us that the greatest uncertainty in the estimate is in the 5 day period from ~14 to 19 days because that’s the region in which the probability changes most rapidly as a function of elapsed time. Of course, the exact numbers are dependent on the assumed form of the distribution. I’ll say more about this in the final section.

To close this section, I’d like to reprise a point I mentioned earlier: that uncertainty is a shape, not a number. Monte Carlo simulations make the uncertainty in estimates explicit and can help you frame your estimates in the language of probability…and using a tool like Excel can help you explain these to non-technical people like your manager.

### Closing remarks

We’ve covered a fair bit of ground: starting from general observations about how long a task takes, saw how to construct simple probability distributions and then combine these using Monte Carlo simulation.  Before I close, there are a few general points I should mention for completeness…and as warning.

First up, it should be clear that the estimates one obtains from a simulation depend critically on the form and parameters of the distribution used. The parameters are essentially an empirical matter; they should be determined using historical data. The form of the function, is another matter altogether: as pointed out in an earlier section, one cannot determine the shape of a function from a finite number of data points. Instead, one has to focus on the properties that are important. For example, is there a small but finite chance that a task can take an unreasonably long time? If so, you may want to use a lognormal distribution…but remember, you will need to find a sensible way to estimate the distribution parameters from your historical data.

Second, you may have noted from the probability distribution curve (Figure 11)  that despite the skewed distributions of the individual tasks, the distribution of the overall completion time is somewhat symmetric with a minimum of ~9 days, most likely time of ~16 days and maximum of 24 days.  It turns out that this is a general property of distributions that are generated by adding a large number of independent probabilistic variables. As the number of variables increases, the overall distribution will tend to the ubiquitous Normal distribution.

The assumption of independence merits a closer look.  In the case it hand,  it implies that the completion times for each task are independent of each other. As most project managers will know from experience, this is rarely the case: in real life,  a task that is delayed will usually have knock-on effects on subsequent tasks. One can easily incorporate such dependencies in a Monte Carlo simulation. A formal way to do this is to introduce a non-zero correlation coefficient between tasks as I have done here. A simpler and more realistic approach is to introduce conditional inter-task dependencies As an example, one could have an inter-task delay that kicks in only if the predecessor task takes more than 80%  of its maximum time.

Thirdly, you may have wondered why I used 10,000 trials: why not 100, or 1000 or 20,000. This has to do with the tricky issue of convergence. In a nutshell, the estimates we obtain should not depend on the number of trials used.  Why? Because if they did, they’d be meaningless.

Operationally, convergence means that any predicted quantity based on aggregates should not vary with number of trials.  So, if our Monte Carlo simulation has converged, our prediction of 19.5 days for the 90% likely completion time should not change substantially if I increase the number of trials from ten to twenty thousand. I did this and obtained almost the same value of 19.5 days. The average and median completion times (shown in cell Q3 and Q4 of Sheet 1) also remained much the same (16.8 days). If you wish to repeat the calculation, be sure to change the formulas on all three sheets appropriately. I was lazy and hardcoded the number of trials. Sorry!

Finally, I should mention that simulations can be usefully performed at a higher level than individual tasks. In their highly-readable book,  Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects, Tom De Marco and Timothy Lister show how Monte Carlo methods can be used for variables such as  velocity, time, cost etc.  at the project level as opposed to the task level. I believe it is better to perform simulations at the lowest possible level, the main reason being that it is easier, and less error-prone, to estimate individual tasks than entire projects. Nevertheless, high level simulations can be very useful if one has reliable data to base these on.

There are a few more things I could say about the usefulness of the generated distribution functions and Monte Carlo in general, but they are best relegated to a future article. This one is much too long already and I think I’ve tested your patience enough. Thanks so much for reading, I really do appreciate it and hope that you found it useful.

Acknowledgement: My thanks to Peter Holberton for pointing out a few typographical and coding errors in an earlier version of this article. These have now been fixed. I’d be grateful if readers could bring any errors they find to my attention.

Written by K

March 27, 2018 at 4:11 pm

Tagged with

## The map and the territory – a project manager’s reflections on the Seven Bridges Walk

Korzybski’s aphorism about the gap between the map and the territory tells a truth that is best understood by walking the territory.

### The map

Some weeks ago my friend John and I did the Seven Bridges Walk, a 28 km affair organised annually by the NSW Cancer Council.  The route loops around a section of the Sydney shoreline, taking in north shore and city vistas, traversing seven bridges along the way. I’d been thinking about doing the walk for some years but couldn’t find anyone interested enough to commit a Sunday.  A serendipitous conversation with John a few months ago changed that.

John and I are both in reasonable shape as we are keen bushwalkers. However, the ones we do are typically in the 10 – 15 km range.  Seven Bridges, being about double that, presented a higher order challenge.  The best way to allay our concerns was to plan. We duly got hold of a map and worked out a schedule based on an average pace of 5 km per hour (including breaks), a figure that seemed reasonable at the time (Figure 1 – click on images to see full sized versions).

Figure 1:The map, the plan

Some key points:

1. We planned to start around 7:45 am at Hunters Hill Village and have our first break at Lane Cove Village, around the 5 to 6 km from the starting point. Our estimated time for this section was about an hour.
2. The plan was to take the longer, more interesting route (marked in green). This covered bushland and parks rather than roads. The detours begin at sections of the walk marked as “Decision Points” in the map, and add at a couple of kilometers to the walk, making it a round 30 km overall.
3. If needed, we would stop at the 9 or 11 km mark (Wollstonecraft or Milson’s Point) for another break before heading on towards the city.
4. We figured it would take us 4 to 5 hours (including breaks) to do the 18 km from Hunters Hill to Pyrmont Village in the heart of the city, so lunch would be between noon and 1 pm.
5. The backend of the walk, the ~ 10 km from Pyrmont to Hunters Hill, would be covered at an easier pace in the afternoon. We thought this section would take us 2.5 to 3 hours giving us a finish time of around 4 pm.

A planned finish time of 4 pm meant we had enough extra time in hand if we needed it. We were very comfortable with what we’d charted out on the map.

### The territory

We started on time and made our first crossing at around 8am:  Fig Tree Bridge, about a kilometer from the starting point.  John took this beautiful shot from one end, the yellow paintwork and purple Jacaranda set against the diffuse light off the Lane Cove River.

Figure 2: Lane Cove River from Fig Tree Bridge

Looking city-wards from the middle of the bridge, I got this one of a couple of morning kayakers.

Figure 3: Morning kayakers on the river

Scenes such as these convey a sense of what it was like to experience the territory, something a map cannot do.  The gap between the map and the territory is akin to the one between a plan and a project; the lived experience of a project is very different from the plan, and is also unique to each individual. Jon Whitty and Bronte van der Hoorn explore this at length in a fascinating paper that relates the experience of managing a project to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

The route then took us through a number of steep (but mercifully short) sections in the Lane Cove and Wollstonecraft area.  On researching these later, I was gratified to find that three are featured in the Top 10 Hill runs in Lane Cove.   Here’s a Google Street View shot of the top ranked one.  Though it doesn’t look like much, it’s not the kind of gradient you want to encounter in a long walk.

Figure 4: A bit of a climb

As we negotiated these sections, it occurred to me that part of the fun lay in not knowing they were coming up.  It’s often better not to anticipate challenges that are an unavoidable feature of the territory and deal with them as they arise.  Just to be clear, I’m talking  about routine challenges that are part of the territory, not those that are avoidable or have the potential to derail a project altogether.

It was getting to be time for that planned first coffee break. When drawing up our plan, we had assumed that all seven starting points (marked in blue in the map in Figure 1) would have cafes.  Bad assumption: the starting points were set off from the main commercial areas. In retrospect, this makes good sense: you don’t want to have thousands of walkers traipsing through a small commercial area, disturbing the peace of locals enjoying a Sunday morning coffee. Whatever the reason, the point is that a taken-for-granted assumption turned out to be wrong; we finally got our first coffee well past the 10 km mark.

Post coffee, as we continued city-wards through Lavender Street we got this unexpected view:

Figure 5: Harbour Bridge from Lavender St.

The view was all the sweeter because we realised we were close to the Harbour, well ahead of schedule (it was a little after 10 am).

The Harbour Bridge is arguably the most recognisable Sydney landmark.  So instead of yet another stereotypical shot of it, I took one that shows a walker’s perspective while crossing it:

Figure 6: A pedestrian’s view of The Bridge

The barbed wire and mesh fencing detract from what would be an absolutely breathtaking view. According to this report, the fence has been in place for safety reasons since 1934!  And yes, as one might expect, it is a sore point with tourists who come from far and wide to see the bridge.

Descriptions of things – which are but maps of a kind – often omit details that are significant. Sometimes this is done to downplay negative aspects of the object or event in question. How often have you, as a project manager, “dressed-up” reports to your stakeholders?  Not outright lies, but stretching the truth. I’ve done it often enough.

The section south of The Bridge took us through parks surrounding the newly developed Barangaroo precinct which hugs the northern shoreline of the Sydney central business district.  Another kilometer, and we were at crossing # 3, the Pyrmont Bridge in Darling Harbour:

Figure 7: Pyrmont Bridge

Though almost an hour and half ahead of schedule, we took a short break for lunch at Darling Harbour before pressing on to Balmain and Anzac Bridge.  John took this shot looking upward from Anzac Bridge:

Figure: View looking up from Anzac Bridge

Commissioned in 1995,  it replaced the Glebe Island Bridge, an electrically operated swing bridge constructed in 1903, which remained the main route from the city out to the western suburbs for over 90 years! As one might imagine, as the number of vehicles in the city increased many-fold from the 60s onwards, the old bridge became a major point of congestion. The Glebe Island Bridge,  now retired, is a listed heritage site.

Incidentally, this little nugget of history was related to me by John as we walked this section of the route. It’s something I would almost certainly have missed had he not been with me that day. Journeys, real and metaphoric, are often enriched by travelling companions who point out things or fill in context  that would otherwise be passed over.

Once past Anzac Bridge, the route took us off the main thoroughfare through the side streets of Rozelle. Many of these are lined by heritage buildings. Rozelle is in the throes of change as it is going to be impacted by a major motorway project.

The project reflects a wider problem in Australia: the relative neglect of public transport compared to road infrastructure. The counter-argument is that the relatively small population of the country makes the capital investments and running costs of public transport prohibitive. A wicked problem with no easy answers, but I do believe that the more sustainable option, though more expensive initially, will prove to be the better one in the long run.

Wicked problems are expected in large infrastructure projects that affect thousands of stakeholders, many of whom will have diametrically opposing views.  What is less well appreciated is that even much smaller projects – say IT initiatives within a large organisation – can have elements of wickedness that can trip up the unwary.  This is often magnified by management decisions  made on the basis of short-term expediency.

From the side streets of Rozelle, the walk took us through Callan Park, which was the site of a psychiatric hospital from 1878 to 1994 (see this article for a horrifying history of asylums in Sydney).  Some of the asylum buildings are now part of the Sydney College of The Arts.  Pending the establishment of a trust to manage ongoing use of the site, the park is currently managed by the NSW Government in consultation with the local municipality.

Our fifth crossing of the day was Iron Cove Bridge.  The cursory shot I took while crossing it does not do justice to the view; the early afternoon sun was starting to take its toll.

Figure 9: View from Iron Cove Bridge

The route then took us about a kilometer and half through the backstreets of Drummoyne to the penultimate crossing: Gladesville Bridge  whose claim to fame is that it was for many years the longest single span concrete arch bridge in the world (another historical vignette that came to me via John).  It has since been superseded by the Qinglong Railway Bridge in China.

By this time I was feeling quite perky, cheered perhaps by the realisation that we were almost done.  I took time to compose perhaps my best shot of the day as we crossed Gladesville Bridge.

Figure 10: View from Gladesville Bridge

…and here’s one of the aforementioned arch, taken from below the bridge:

Figure 11: A side view of Gladesville Bridge

The final crossing, Tarban Creek Bridge was a short 100 metre walk from the Gladesville Bridge. We lingered mid-bridge to take a few shots as we realised the walk was coming to an end; the finish point was a few hundred metres away.

Figure 12: View from Tarban Creek Bridge

We duly collected our “Seven Bridges Completed” stamp at around 2:30 pm and headed to the local pub for a celebratory pint.

Figure 13: A well-deserved pint

### Wrapping up

Gregory Bateson once wrote:

“We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put upon paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the [person] who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. The territory is [the thing in itself] and you can’t do anything with it. Always the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum.”

One might think that a solution lies in making ever more accurate representations, but that is an exercise in futility. Indeed, as Borges pointed out in a short story:

“… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless…”

Apart from being impossibly cumbersome, a complete map of a territory is impossible because a representation can never be the real thing. The territory remains forever ineffable; every encounter with it is unique and has the potential to  reveal new perspectives.

This is as true for a project as it is for a walk or any other experience.

Written by K

November 27, 2017 at 1:33 pm

Posted in Project Management

## The law of requisite variety and its implications for enterprise IT

### Introduction

There are two  facets to the operation of IT systems and processes in organisations:  governance, the standards and regulations associated with a system or process; and execution, which relates to steering the actual work of the system or process in specific situations.

An example might help clarify the difference:

The purpose of project management is to keep projects on track. There are two aspects to this: one pertaining to the project management office (PMO) which is responsible for standards and regulations associated with managing projects in general, and the other relating to the day-to-day work of steering a particular project.  The two sometimes work at cross-purposes. For example, successful project managers know that much of their work is about navigate their projects through the potentially treacherous terrain of their organisations, an activity that sometimes necessitates working around, or even breaking, rules set by the PMO.

Governance and steering share a common etymological root: the word kybernetes, which means steersman in Greek.  It also happens to be the root word of Cybernetics  which is the science of regulation or control.   In this post,  I  apply a key principle of cybernetics to a couple of areas of enterprise IT.

### Cybernetic systems

An oft quoted example of a cybernetic system is a thermostat, a device that regulates temperature based on inputs from the environment.  Most cybernetic systems are way more complicated than a thermostat. Indeed, some argue that the Earth is a huge cybernetic system. A smaller scale example is a system consisting of a car + driver wherein a driver responds to changes in the environment thereby controlling the motion of the car.

Cybernetic systems vary widely not just in size, but also in complexity. A thermostat is concerned only the ambient temperature whereas the driver in a car has to worry about a lot more (e.g. the weather, traffic, the condition of the road, kids squabbling in the back-seat etc.).   In general, the more complex the system and its processes, the larger the number of variables that are associated with it. Put another way, complex systems must be able to deal with a greater variety of disturbances than simple systems.

### The law of requisite variety

It turns out there is a fundamental principle – the law of requisite variety– that governs the capacity of a system to respond to changes in its environment. The law is a quantitative statement about the different types of responses that a system needs to have in order to deal with the range of  disturbances it might experience.

According to this paper, the law of requisite variety asserts that:

The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate.

Mathematically:

V(E) > V(D) – V(R) – K

Where V represents variety, E represents the essential variable(s) to be controlled, D represents the disturbance, R the regulation and K the passive capacity of the system to absorb shocks. The terms are explained in brief below:

V(E) represents the set of  desired outcomes for the controlled environmental variable:  desired temperature range in the case of the thermostat,  successful outcomes (i.e. projects delivered on time and within budget) in the case of a project management office.

V(D) represents the variety of disturbances the system can be subjected to (the ways in which the temperature can change, the external and internal forces on a project)

V(R) represents the various ways in which a disturbance can be regulated (the regulator in a thermostat, the project tracking and corrective mechanisms prescribed by the PMO)

K represents the buffering capacity of the system – i.e. stored capacity to deal with unexpected disturbances.

I won’t say any more about the law of requisite variety as it would take me to far afield; the interested and technically minded reader is referred to the link above or this paper for more.

### Implications for enterprise IT

In plain English, the law of requisite variety states that only “variety can absorb variety.”  As stated by Anthony Hodgson in an essay in this book, the law of requisite variety:

…leads to the somewhat counterintuitive observation that the regulator must have a sufficiently large variety of actions in order to ensure a sufficiently small variety of outcomes in the essential variables E. This principle has important implications for practical situations: since the variety of perturbations a system can potentially be confronted with is unlimited, we should always try maximize its internal variety (or diversity), so as to be optimally prepared for any foreseeable or unforeseeable contingency.

This is entirely consistent with our intuitive expectation that the best way to deal with the unexpected is to have a range of tools and approaches at ones disposal.

In the remainder of this piece, I’ll focus on the implications of the law for an issue that is high on the list of many corporate IT departments: the standardization of  IT systems and/or processes.

The main rationale behind standardizing an IT  process is to handle all possible demands (or use cases) via a small number of predefined responses.   When put this way, the connection to the law of requisite variety is clear: a request made upon a function such as a service desk or project management office (PMO) is a disturbance and the way they regulate or respond to it determines the outcome.

### Requisite variety and the service desk

A service desk is a good example of a system that can be standardized. Although users may initially complain about having to log a ticket instead of calling Nathan directly, in time they get used to it, and may even start to see the benefits…particularly when Nathan goes on vacation.

The law of requisite variety tells us successful standardization requires that all possible demands made on the system be known and regulated by the  V(R)  term in the equation above. In case of a service desk this is dealt with by a hierarchy of support levels. 1st level support deals with routine calls (incidents and service requests in ITIL terminology) such as system access and simple troubleshooting. Calls that cannot be handled by this tier are escalated to the 2nd and 3rd levels as needed.  The assumption here is that, between them, the three support tiers should be able to handle majority of calls.

Slack  (the K term) relates to unexploited capacity.  Although needed in order to deal with unexpected surges in demand, slack is expensive to carry when one doesn’t need it.  Given this, it makes sense to incorporate such scenarios into the repertoire of the standard system responses (i.e the V(R) term) whenever possible.  One way to do this is to anticipate surges in demand and hire temporary staff to handle them. Another way  is to deal with infrequent scenarios outside the system- i.e. deem them out of scope for the service desk.

Service desk standardization is thus relatively straightforward to achieve provided:

• The kinds of calls that come in are largely predictable.
• The work can be routinized.
• All non-routine work – such as an application enhancement request or a demand for a new system-  is  dealt with outside the system via (say) a change management process.

All this will be quite unsurprising and obvious to folks working in corporate IT. Now  let’s see what happens when we apply the law to a more complex system.

### Requisite variety and the PMO

Many corporate IT leaders see the establishment of a PMO as a way to control costs and increase efficiency of project planning and execution.   PMOs attempt to do this by putting in place governance mechanisms. The underlying cause-effect assumption is that if appropriate rules and regulations are put in place, project execution will necessarily improve.  Although this sounds reasonable, it often does not work in practice: according to this article, a significant fraction of PMOs fail to deliver on the promise of improved project performance. Consider the following points quoted directly from the article:

• “50% of project management offices close within 3 years (Association for Project Mgmt)”
• “Since 2008, the correlated PMO implementation failure rate is over 50% (Gartner Project Manager 2014)”
• “Only a third of all projects were successfully completed on time and on budget over the past year (Standish Group’s CHAOS report)”
• “68% of stakeholders perceive their PMOs to be bureaucratic     (2013 Gartner PPM Summit)”
• “Only 40% of projects met schedule, budget and quality goals (IBM Change Management Survey of 1500 execs)”

The article goes on to point out that the main reason for the statistics above is that there is a gap between what a PMO does and what the business expects it to do. For example, according to the Gartner review quoted in the article over 60% of the stakeholders surveyed believe their PMOs are overly bureaucratic.  I can’t vouch for the veracity of the numbers here as I cannot find the original paper. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence (via various articles and informal conversations) suggests that a significant number of PMOs fail.

There is a curious contradiction between the case of the service desk and that of the PMO. In the former, process and methodology seem to work whereas in the latter they don’t.

Why?

The answer, as you might suspect, has to do with variety.  Projects and service requests are very different beasts. Among other things, they differ in:

• Duration: A project typically goes over many months whereas a service request has a lifetime of days,
• Technical complexity: A project involves many (initially ill-defined) technical tasks that have to be coordinated and whose outputs have to be integrated.  A service request typically consists one (or a small number) of well-defined tasks.
• Social complexity: A project involves many stakeholder groups, with diverse interests and opinions. A service request typically involves considerably fewer stakeholders, with limited conflicts of opinions/interests.

It is not hard to see that these differences increase variety in projects compared to service requests. The reason that standardization (usually) works for service desks  but (often) fails for PMOs is that the PMOs are subjected a greater variety of disturbances than service desks.

The key point is that the increased variety in the case of the PMO precludes standardisation.  As the law of requisite variety tells us, there are two ways to deal with variety:  regulate it  or adapt to it. Most PMOs take the regulation route, leading to over-regulation and outcomes that are less than satisfactory. This is exactly what is reflected in the complaint about PMOs being overly bureaucratic. The solution simple and obvious solution is for PMOs to be more flexible– specifically, they must be able to adapt to the ever changing demands made upon them by their organisations’ projects.  In terms of the law of requisite variety, PMOs need to have the capacity to change the system response, V(R), on the fly. In practice this means recognising the uniqueness of requests by avoiding reflex, cookie cutter responses that characterise bureaucratic PMOs.

### Wrapping up

The law of requisite variety is a general principle that applies to any regulated system.  In this post I applied the law to two areas of enterprise IT – service management and project governance – and  discussed why standardization works well  for the former but less satisfactorily for the latter. Indeed, in view of the considerable differences in the duration and complexity of service requests and projects, it is unreasonable to expect that standardization will work well for both.  The key takeaway from this piece is therefore a simple one: those who design IT functions should pay attention to the variety that the functions will have to cope with, and bear in mind that standardization works well only if variety is known and limited.

Written by K

December 12, 2016 at 9:00 pm

## Improving decision-making in projects

An irony of organisational life is that the most important decisions on projects (or any other initiatives) have to be made at the start, when ambiguity is at its highest and information availability lowest. I recently gave a talk at the Pune office of BMC Software on improving decision-making in such situations.

The talk was recorded and simulcast to a couple of locations in India. The folks at BMC very kindly sent me a copy of the recording with permission to publish it on Eight to Late. Here it is:

Based on the questions asked and the feedback received, I reckon that a number of people found the talk  useful. I’d welcome your comments/feedback.

Acknowledgements: My thanks go out to Gaurav Pal, Manish Gadgil and Mrinalini Wankhede for giving me the opportunity to speak at BMC, and to Shubhangi Apte for putting me in touch with them. Finally, I’d like to thank the wonderful audience at BMC for their insightful questions and comments.

Written by K

January 19, 2016 at 5:28 pm

## The Risk – a dialogue mapping vignette

with one comment

### Foreword

Last week, my friend Paul Culmsee conducted an internal workshop in my organisation on the theme of collaborative problem solving. Dialogue mapping is one of the tools he introduced during the workshop.  This piece, primarily intended as a follow-up for attendees,  is an introduction to dialogue mapping via a vignette that illustrates its practice (see this post for another one). I’m publishing it here as I thought it might be useful for those who wish to understand what the technique is about.

Dialogue mapping uses a notation called Issue Based Information System (IBIS), which I have discussed at length in this post. For completeness, I’ll begin with a short introduction to the notation and then move on to the vignette.

### A crash course in IBIS

The IBIS notation consists of the following three elements:

1. Issues(or questions): these are issues that are being debated. Typically, issues are framed as questions on the lines of “What should we do about X?” where X is the issue that is of interest to a group. For example, in the case of a group of executives, X might be rapidly changing market condition whereas in the case of a group of IT people, X could be an ageing system that is hard to replace.
2. Ideas(or positions): these are responses to questions. For example, one of the ideas of offered by the IT group above might be to replace the said system with a newer one. Typically the whole set of ideas that respond to an issue in a discussion represents the spectrum of participant perspectives on the issue.
3. Arguments: these can be Pros (arguments for) or Cons (arguments against) an issue. The complete set of arguments that respond to an idea represents the multiplicity of viewpoints on it.

Compendium is a freeware tool that can be used to create IBIS maps– it can be downloaded here.

In Compendium, IBIS elements are represented as nodes as shown in Figure 1: issues are represented by blue-green question markspositions by yellow light bulbspros by green + signs and cons by red – signs.  Compendium supports a few other node types, but these are not part of the core IBIS notation. Nodes can be linked only in ways specified by the IBIS grammar as I discuss next.

Figure 1: IBIS node types

The IBIS grammar can be summarized in three simple rules:

1. Issues can be raised anew or can arise from other issues, positions or arguments. In other words, any IBIS element can be questioned.  In Compendium notation:  a question node can connect to any other IBIS node.
2. Ideas can only respond to questions– i.e. in Compendium “light bulb” nodes can only link to question nodes. The arrow pointing from the idea to the question depicts the “responds to” relationship.
3. Arguments  can only be associated with ideas– i.e. in Compendium “+” and “–“  nodes can only link to “light bulb” nodes (with arrows pointing to the latter)

The legal links are summarized in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Legal links in IBIS

…and that’s pretty much all there is to it.

The interesting (and powerful) aspect of IBIS is that the essence of any debate or discussion can be captured using these three elements. Let me try to convince you of this claim via a vignette from a discussion on risk.

### The Risk – a Dialogue Mapping vignette

“Morning all,” said Rick, “I know you’re all busy people so I’d like to thank you for taking the time to attend this risk identification session for Project X.  The objective is to list the risks that we might encounter on the project and see if we can identify possible mitigation strategies.”

He then asked if there were any questions. The head waggles around the room indicated there were none.

“Good. So here’s what we’ll do,”  he continued. “I’d like you all to work in pairs and spend 10 minutes thinking of all possible risks and then another 5 minutes prioritising.  Work with the person on your left. You can use the flipcharts in the breakout area at the back if you wish to.”

Twenty minutes later, most people were done and back in their seats.

“OK, it looks as though most people are done…Ah, Joe, Mike have you guys finished?” The two were still working on their flip-chart at the back.

“Yeah, be there in a sec,” replied Mike, as he tore off the flip-chart page.

“Alright,” continued Rick, after everyone had settled in. “What I’m going to do now is ask you all to list your top three risks. I’d also like you tell me why they are significant and your mitigation strategies for them.” He paused for a second and asked, “Everyone OK with that?”

Everyone nodded, except Helen who asked, “isn’t it important that we document the discussion?”

“I’m glad you brought that up. I’ll make notes as we go along, and I’ll do it in a way that everyone can see what I’m writing. I’d like you all to correct me if you feel I haven’t understood what you’re saying. It is important that  my notes capture your issues, ideas and arguments accurately.”

Rick turned on the data projector, fired up Compendium and started a new map.  “Our aim today is to identify the most significant risks on the project – this is our root question”  he said, as he created a question node. “OK, so who would like to start?”

Figure 3: The root question

“Sure,” we’ll start, said Joe easily. “Our top risk is that the schedule is too tight. We’ll hit the deadline only if everything goes well, and everyone knows that they never do.”

“OK,” said Rick, “as he entered Joe and Mike’s risk as an idea connecting to the root question. “You’ve also mentioned a point that supports your contention that this is a significant risk – there is absolutely no buffer.” Rick typed this in as a pro connecting to the risk. He then looked up at Joe and asked,  “have I understood you correctly?”

“Yes,” confirmed Joe.

Figure 4: Map in progress

“That’s pretty cool,” said Helen from the other end of the table, “I like the notation, it makes reasoning explicit. Oh, and I have another point in support of Joe and Mike’s risk – the deadline was imposed by management before the project was planned.”

Rick began to enter the point…

“Oooh, I’m not sure we should put that down,” interjected Rob from compliance. “I mean, there’s not much we can do about that can we?”

…Rick finished the point as Rob was speaking.

Figure 5: Two pros for the idea

“I hear you Rob, but I think  it is important we capture everything that is said,” said Helen.

“I disagree,” said Rob. “It will only annoy management.”

“Slow down guys,” said Rick, “I’m going to capture Rob’s objection as “this is a management imposed-constraint rather than risk. Are you OK with that, Rob?”

Rob nodded his assent.

Fig 6: A con enters the picture

I think it is important we articulate what we really think, even if we can’t do anything about it,” continued Rick. There’s no point going through this exercise if we don’t say what we really think. I want to stress this point, so I’m going to add honesty  and openness  as ground rules for the discussion. Since ground rules apply to the entire discussion, they connect directly to the primary issue being discussed.”

Figure 7: A “criterion” that applies to the analysis of all risks

“OK, so any other points that anyone would like to add to the ones made so far?” Queried Rick as he finished typing.

He looked up. Most of the people seated round the table shook their heads indicating that there weren’t.

“We haven’t spoken about mitigation strategies. Any ideas?” Asked Rick, as he created a question node marked “Mitigation?” connecting to the risk.

Figure 8: Mitigating the risk

“Yeah well, we came up with one,” said Mike. “we think the only way to reduce the time pressure is to cut scope.”

“OK,” said Rick, entering the point as an idea connecting to the “Mitigation?” question. “Did you think about how you are going to do this? He entered the question “How?” connecting to Mike’s point.

Figure 9: Mitigating the risk

“That’s the problem,” said Joe, “I don’t know how we can convince management to cut scope.”

“Hmmm…I have an idea,” said Helen slowly…

“We’re all ears,” said Rick.

“…Well…you see a large chunk of time has been allocated for building real-time interfaces to assorted systems – HR, ERP etc. I don’t think these need to be real-time – they could be done monthly…and if that’s the case, we could schedule a simple job or even do them manually for the first few months. We can push those interfaces to phase 2 of the project, well into next year.”

There was a silence in the room as everyone pondered this point.

“You know, I think that might actually work, and would give us an extra month…may be even six weeks for the more important upstream stuff,” said Mike. “Great idea, Helen!”

“Can I summarise this point as – identify interfaces that can be delayed to phase 2?” asked Rick, as he began to type it in as a mitigation strategy. “…and if you and Mike are OK with it, I’m going to combine it with the ‘Cut Scope’ idea to save space.”

“Yep, that’s fine,” said Helen. Mike nodded OK.

Rick deleted the “How?” node connecting to the “Cut scope” idea, and edited the latter to capture Helen’s point.

Figure 10: Mitigating the risk

“That’s great in theory, but who is going to talk to the affected departments? They will not be happy.” asserted Rob.  One could always count on compliance to throw in a reality check.

“Good point,”  said Rick as he typed that in as a con, “and I’ll take the responsibility of speaking to the department heads about this,” he continued entering the idea into the map and marking it as an action point for himself. “Is there anything else that Joe, Mike…or anyone else would like to add here,” he added, as he finished.

Figure 11: Completed discussion of first risk (click to view larger image)

“Nope,” said Mike, “I’m good with that.”

“Yeah me too,” said Helen.

“I don’t have anything else to say about this point,” said Rob, “ but it would be great if you could give us a tutorial on this technique. I think it could be useful to summarise the rationale behind our compliance regulations. Folks have been complaining that they don’t understand the reasoning behind some of our rules and regulations. ”

“I’d be interested in that too,” said Helen, “I could use it to clarify user requirements.”

“I’d be happy to do a session on the IBIS notation and dialogue mapping next week. I’ll check your availability and send an invite out… but for now, let’s focus on the task at hand.”

The discussion continued…but the fly on the wall was no longer there to record it.

### Afterword

I hope this little vignette illustrates how IBIS and dialogue mapping can aid collaborative decision-making / problem solving by making diverse viewpoints explicit. That said, this is a story, and the problem with stories is that things  go the way the author wants them to.  In real life, conversations can go off on unexpected tangents, making them really hard to map. So, although it is important to gain expertise in using the software, it is far more important to practice mapping live conversations. The latter is an art that requires considerable practice. I recommend reading Paul Culmsee’s series on the practice of dialogue mapping or <advertisement> Chapter 14 of The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices</advertisement> for more on this point.

That said, there are many other ways in which IBIS can be used, that do not require as much skill. Some of these include: mapping the central points in written arguments (what’s sometimes called issue mapping) and even decisions on personal matters.

To sum up: IBIS is a powerful means to clarify options and lay them out in an easy-to-follow visual format. Often this is all that is required to catalyse a group decision.

Written by K

June 10, 2015 at 9:14 am