How Pie Charts, Mr. Spock and the Big Picture Can Optimize Your Projects

By Executive Brief Staff

Maybe You Should Add Mr. Spock to Your Team, The Logical Approach to Resource Allocation

Simplicity is not necessarily the aim of Mark Harman, a software engineering professor at King’s College in London. He works to find new ways to estimate maximal resource allocation using mathematical and statistical analysis.

Researchers like Harman take situations companies often face and experiment with a variety of different approaches and outcomes, trying to find correlations between certain sorts of decisions and results.

The goal of these undertakings, he says, is to arm executives with another tool they can use to help make decisions. “It's rather like having Mr. Spock on the team. These algorithms are very logical,” he said.

But Brim isn’t so sure successful ship captains are willing to bring such components on board. “People are really pressed for time,” he said. “I find they don’t have time to take on new algorithms.”

One misconception many companies have, Harman said, is if they utilize such research the numbers will have too great an impact on decision-making. But the human element is just as important.

“There’s nearly always something that the manager knows that’s implicit,” Harman said.

He believes businesses are often intimidated not by the data itself, but by the inherent risks of experimentation. I tend to meet people at conferences who are into estimates and testing, but they can’t get their bosses to buy into it,” Harman said. The scenario he’s found they most often fear is that once sensitive data is given to independent researchers, trade secrets will be disclosed on the open market. “Companies often imagine things,” he said.

Harman, with whom such tech giants as Sony and Motorola have trusted their data, said that when it comes to resource allocation in particular, the information academics want doesn’t have to be too specific. “We only need to know basic numerical figures,” he said. “We know it as work package 49. We don’t need to know what it’s about.”

Harman and his teams are using the raw numbers they get from Sony, Motorola and others to come up with quantifiable answers to the kind of questions that have traditionally been difficult for those in charge of allocation to answer, such as “Whom should I assign to a project” and “How much time will the team need to finish what they’re doing?”

One of the ways he’s doing this is by using what’s known as a Pareto front, an idea borne of economic research in which one charts a set of options and assigns numerical values to all the possible outcomes with the intent of narrowing the field to only the most efficient choices.

Harman compares the idea of Darwinian evolution to the notion that there are a myriad of potential solutions to a problem but only one answer, or set of answers, that is a fit solution. “It allows us to look at the tradeoff between certainty and risk,” he said. “What you want to find is the sweet spots in that tradeoff space.”

“We create an environment in which we breed solutions to problems,” he said. “We take the best bits of each project plan.”

Zeroing in on the right answer is also the aim of research allocation tools. The key is to manage all of the variables surrounding a specific project.

     Email This Article      Print This Article