I wonder how hard it would be to design a cost+confidence widget that would be easily compatible (for liberal values of easy) with spreadsheets.
I’m reading a Bloomberg piece about Boeing which quotes employees talking about the MAX as being largely a problem of choosing the lowest bidder. This is also a notorious problem in other places where there are rules which specify using the lowest cost contractor, like parts of California and many federal procurement programs. It’s a pretty widespread complaint.
It would also be completely crazy for it to be any other way, for what feels like a simple reason: no one knows anything except the quoted price. There’s no way to communicate confidence simply or easily. The lowest bid is easily transmitted through any spreadsheet, word document, or accounting software, quality of work be damned. Any attempt to even evaluate the work is a complicated one-off report, usually with poorly considered graphics, which isn’t even included with the budget information so many decision makers are unlikely to ever see it.
So, a cost+confidence widget. On the simple end I suppose it could just be a re-calculation using a reference class forecast. But if I’m honest what I really want is something like a spreadsheet where each cell has both a numerical and graphical value, so I could hover my mouse over the number to see the confidence graph, or switch views to see the confidence graphs instead of the values.
Then if we’re getting really ambitious, something like a time+confidence widget would also be awesome. Then when the time+confidence and cost+confidence values are all multiplied together, the output is a like a heat map of the two values, showing the distribution of project outcomes overall.
I wonder how hard it would be to design a cost+confidence widget that would be easily compatible (for liberal values of easy) with spreadsheets.
I’m reading a Bloomberg piece about Boeing which quotes employees talking about the MAX as being largely a problem of choosing the lowest bidder. This is also a notorious problem in other places where there are rules which specify using the lowest cost contractor, like parts of California and many federal procurement programs. It’s a pretty widespread complaint.
It would also be completely crazy for it to be any other way, for what feels like a simple reason: no one knows anything except the quoted price. There’s no way to communicate confidence simply or easily. The lowest bid is easily transmitted through any spreadsheet, word document, or accounting software, quality of work be damned. Any attempt to even evaluate the work is a complicated one-off report, usually with poorly considered graphics, which isn’t even included with the budget information so many decision makers are unlikely to ever see it.
So, a cost+confidence widget. On the simple end I suppose it could just be a re-calculation using a reference class forecast. But if I’m honest what I really want is something like a spreadsheet where each cell has both a numerical and graphical value, so I could hover my mouse over the number to see the confidence graph, or switch views to see the confidence graphs instead of the values.
Then if we’re getting really ambitious, something like a time+confidence widget would also be awesome. Then when the time+confidence and cost+confidence values are all multiplied together, the output is a like a heat map of the two values, showing the distribution of project outcomes overall.