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by Richard Maltzman,
Dave Shirley
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Date
The average length of a song played on today’s radio stations is 3 minutes. It’s raining in Maracaibo, Venezuela, right now. You’re hungry. Tom McMillen was the all-time tallest Congressman in the US. Oh, look! Karen got engaged! The state insect of Massachusetts is the ladybug. Rubbing alcohol is usually isopropyl. There are 13 players on a rugby team. You’re thirsty.
These are bits of data. Every day, you process (or at least - you are bombarded with) thousands or even tens of thousands of these tidbits – especially nowadays, with the amount of email and other electronic media bombardment that we all get. One of the key jobs of a project manager is advancing these bits of sometimes totally random data into information which is more useable by your team members.
This information, in turn can be advanced and packaged further into reports. Reports – according to the PMBOK® Guide, are the highest form of conveyance.
Actually, there’s quite a bit of study around this, and it’s beyond the scope of this blog post. However we would steer you to the Wikipedia entry on the DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) pyramid.
The Project Management Institute, however, uses Data -> Information -> Reports. And that brings us to weather reports, which puts us back at our familiar intersection between project management and the triple bottom line – this time focusing in particular on climate and climate change.
An article in today’s Boston Globe talks about Judah Cohen and his propensity for accurate weather forecasts. In fact, he was able (back in November) predict the snowy winter that was a record breaker (in fact it is snowing as this is being written – Boston is now over 110 inches!) better than the NOAA or any other forecasting entity.
He does this using the PMBOK® Guide. Well, not exactly. But he does use the principle of advancing data to information to reports.
From the article:
Each October, Cohen looks at the amount and the rate of snowfall in Siberia that month to determine how snowy the eastern United States and Europe will be come winter. “The snow cover is the most efficient reflector of sunlight out into space, so more snow cover creates dense air masses that stay close to the ground,” he says. That cold, dense air spreads over the North Pole into North America and westward into Europe.
Cohen proceeds to go into more detail than the average human can stand, or understand, with terms like “The Aleutian Low” and “The Siberian High”. But for him and us, the bottom line is that this past October was Siberia’s second most extensive snowfall on record, and Cohen knew the implications for Boston and other East Coast cities.
In a nutshell, that’s the way Cohen works. His analysis embraces multitudes of facts and figures, but his forecasts describe big-picture trends. Like the Farmers’ Almanac, you may ask. Not exactly, he laughs. “The Farmers’ Almanac is not scientifically credible and should only be viewed for entertainment value.”
This connects with climate change in the following way: ask anyone from the northeast US what they thought of February. They’ll tell you it was cold. (If they're from Boston they may add a few choice words as well. I'm guessing they'll use $&#*@ and #@**&, at least. They’ll tell you they were bombarded by snow. They may even tell you that they are beginning to doubt “global warming” theories because it was so terribly cold for so long in February.
But here we go back to Judah Cohen. Again, from the article:
Despite his stellar track record, Cohen knows that long-term climate predictions are tough calls. “I do climate,” he explains. “Weather is what you get. Climate is what you expect.” His is a difficult field with a “very low bar for success,” he says.
Take a look at the map below, provided by NASA. It shows, in shades of orange, temperatures which have been warmer than normal in February 2015. In blue – especially dark blue – you see areas where temperatures were colder.
The northeast US is in deep, dark blue. Which means, if the people there were taking in data about what was locally around them, and not gaining information – or reports – about what was happening more globally in the month, you cannot really fault them for making that conclusion, given what was all around them (lots, and lots of snow, and very cold temperatures – all bleeping month!).
So here is our other lesson from Data-Information-Reports: for data to become information, it has to be centered not only on YOU or your organization but must have a broader perspective. Look at your “stakeholders” on this map from almost anywhere else on the planet, and they’re in the orange, not the blue. To them, February DOES seem warmer than usual.
So, to review...
You are faced with streams of data of all sorts and in all formats, all day long. You need to be capable of parsing that into information and reports for many types of stakeholders, some near you (and here I mean not only geographically but perhaps functionally) and some far away from you.
Take a lesson from Judah Cohen.
· Consider if what you are looking at is ‘weather’ or ‘climate
(PMI might call this "trend analysis")
· Look globally (again, not literally planet wide, although that may apply – we mean globally in terms of multiple viewpoints)
· Spend a little extra time with your data – put extra effort into organizing it...advancing it
o Ask: how can I add ‘meaningfulness’ to this data to help convey an important project message?
That’s it from us today, here in the land of deep, dark blue.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: March 21, 2015 11:12 PM |
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