Wisdom of Crowds: A tool for project forecasting?

Wisdom of Crowds: A tool for project forecasting?

Happy Monday all

I am now back in the office after returning from a fantastic holiday.

When I holiday, I like to download a couple of audiobook for the trip.?The topics of these books generally centres around my passions: Infrastructure Projects, managing uncertainty and estimation biases. I know, I have to get out more! On my holiday, I read ( well listened) to the Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Uncertainty and accuracy in my mind are significant issues that major projects often fail to adequately address. Major projects and programmes are very complicated, each with its own set of challenging characteristics including size, duration, innovation, project envelope, data available, lifecycle process, legal framework and regulatory requirements amongst other constraints. The Wisdom of Crowds is predicated on the idea/argument that decisions made by aggerating information from groups, are often better?than those that could have been made by the “smartest” member of the group. Throughout the books, there are a number of examples related to forecasting (the guessing of the Ox weight comes to mind), but also, a really interesting case study dealing with “uncertainty” and “accuracy”, by using the “wisdom of the crowd” to help locate a sunken USA submarine.

Eating the whole Elephant

One way to address uncertainty and accuracy is to break up large projects into smaller “chunks” and ideally, through repeatable and modular techniques such as those deployed in the installation of wind farms. Often in projects we try to eat the whole elephant! Do we also try to “think the whole elephant?” Having a wisdom of crowd approach, with diverse thinkers and SME’s, particularly at the early project stages, could help the project team to explore multiple and different scenarios by leveraging the SME’s insight, experience, failures, wins, local and sector knowledge and simply the extra capacity (or forks to eat the elephant with).

In my last blog, I mention the importance of bringing “delivery” SME’s into the early stages of UK Gov projects. Often, at the early stages (Pre-brief/SOC) projects are managed and led by the depts policy/economist team. However, as the author notes, to leverage the benefits of insight and “Wisdom” from the “Crowd”, the crowd needs to have the following attributes:

• Diversity of opinion
• Independence
• Decentralisation
• Aggregation

Without the above,?groups of “crowds” can also make bad decision, particularly when the crowd consists off:

• Homogeneity?
• Centralisation
• Division
• Imitation
• Emotionality

Applying the Wisdom of Crowds in the Project Delivery Environment

In project delivery, robust decision-making is critical to achieving better outcomes. As such, harnessing the wisdom of the crowd by ensuring that decisions are derived by aggerating information within project teams possessing the right attributes can be seen as a tactical management lever in its own right. The below are six of my personal project delivery and forecasting reflections in relation to embedding the wisdom of crowds in project delivery:

1. Are we, or our delivery organisations, being impacted by being too homogenous in our thinking and approach? Is it easier to agree, to imitate? Are our peers and teams reinforcing our own biases and blind spots? And, is this being further exacerbated by the, often, hierarchical and bureaucratic project environments?
2. The importance of bringing a independent and diverse SME’s into the early stages of UK Government projects to support the policy development of new projects.
3. Should project teams consider obtaining multiple project forecasts, both internal (and independent) and external and look to average these forecasts to leverage “the wisdom of the crowd” (supported by benchmarking, or when data/benchmarks aren’t available).?
4. Should project teams consider adopting a “Delphi” methodology and approach for understanding, capturing and quantifying?project “Unknowns Unknowns” (as per Scorpion methodology – see link). Aggregating the views of multiple independent and diverse SME’s could potentially help to manage and mitigate the “unknowns” (inc knowns) and improving project forecasting. (Again, underpinned by benchmarking or as an alternative view/if data is not available).
5. The importance of independent and diverse SME’s assurance assessors for undertaken assurance reviews.
6. How can project teams leverage the “wisdom” of their own crowds to lead to better project decision making?

Please feel free to reach out if you would like to hear more on the above and what can be done to mitigate/reduce/improve. I am always happy to discuss the above, so please comment or follow. Always happy to hear the thoughts of the crowds! What are your thoughts on the above? Any other reflections to add??

#forecasting #estimation #infrastructureprojects #majorprojects #forecastingbias #uncertainty

#wisdomofcrowd