Hunch simulator

Welcome readers, this time we’ll continue to cover the book of The Deadline, by Tom De Marco, and as I suspected last article, this new chapter grants us with new information to learn from. Tompkins meets a man called Abdul Jamid, a young man that is very talented in data analytics regarding project management.

He meets Mr.T in Rome while he was out for some personal business affairs. There they ate together and talked about the same subject Tompkins brings: you guessed it, the Morovian project management laboratory. This time the new stuff that this random character brings to the table is a way to turn the subjective into objective: hunches into a simulation.

Every project manager that has experience has its personal feelings, they are their instinct of experience that helps them to make decisions. The truth is that they are 100% subjective, as there are no ways to clarify if those personal hypotheses were true at the end. What Jamid taught Mr. T that evening was a sort of pre-machine learning process to make a model that simulated one of those feelings involved in PM.

After developing a sort of flowchart in which the model is represented the manager has to test it and refine it, along real case scenarios. The more info you feed it with, the more ways it will simulate the real hunch. It is sort of machine learning, but human made. Finally, you can use this tool to compare an initial hunch with real results at the end, thus verifying or rejecting the proposed version of the model.

This could be a useful to use, when refined of course. Instead of waiting for a hunch to be true or false, you could instantly know if you hypothesis is correct or not, and save losses in the way. Tompkins is now armed with a series of powerful weapons that each chapter gave him, so he better succeed in this project. I’m thrilled to see what happens next.