Star Desicion Science

Are you interested in improving decision-making in your company or organization? Members of my LinkedIn group, Decision-Making in Business, are reading about decision-making and discussing ways to improve decision-making in their organizations. Our discussions focus on enterprise architecture, business processes and project, program and portfolio management.

The group is about to begin reading The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This New York Times Best Selling book is extremely provocative. It proposes that the most important events for our businesses (and in economies, societies and life) are rare events that can neither be predicted nor modeled. Meanwhile, businesses focus on the less impactful events that can be forecasted and modeled. As a result, most businesses are unprepared for the events that matter most.

Join our reading and discussions as we consider ways of surviving and thriving in turbulent, unpredictable environments.

Star DS is a research center that studies and improves decision-making in product development, project management and project portfolio management (PPM).

Innovations in PPM

Currently, Star DS is studying PPM and developing the following innovations:

Feedback: The benefits of feedback and Six Sigma process improvement are outstanding. Despite this potential, PPM and phase-gate management practices provide scant feedback. The absence of feedback is not a careless omission. Rather, the absence arises because of project selection. Funded projects represent a biased sample of project proposals and this bias creates problems when generating feedback. Most, perhaps all, analyses of project results must overcome the bias, or their feedback will be inaccurate and even harmful.

Star DS is developing methods of overcoming the bias and creating feedback metrics for evaluating and improving ideation, idea screening, proposal development, project evaluation and project selection.
Pipeline Physics: Most PPM practices and software seek to maximize portfolio value, which is a static statistic. In contrast, one can adopt the dynamic view of projects flowing through a pipeline and strive to increase the flow of value. This perspective produces new equations, a pipeline physics, that govern the flow of value.

Star DS is deriving pipeline physics and developing new practices for shaping pipelines, reducing downstream attrition and managing uncertainty.
Flexible resource management: With proper support and structure, organizations can empower project teams to adjust resource allocation in real time, so that resources flow as needed. This innovation can improve decision-making, increase flexibility and complete more projects on time.

Star DS is beginning to study flexible resource management.

You can learn about these innovations by scheduling a presentation or by reading Star DS's research and white papers. Star DS will provide an online introduction to our PPM research, so please revisit our website soon.