ArcherPoint Dynamics NAV Developer Digest - vol 40

ArcherPoint Dynamics NAV Developer Digest - vol 40

The ArcherPoint technical staff—made up of developers, project managers, and consultants – is constantly communicating internally, with the goal of sharing helpful information with one another.

As they run into issues and questions, find the answers, and make new discoveries, they post them companywide on Yammer for everyone’s benefit. We in Marketing watch these interactions and never cease to be amazed by the creativity, dedication, and brainpower we’re so fortunate to have in this group—so we thought, wouldn’t it be great to share them with the rest of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Community? So, the ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Digest was born. Each week, we present a collection of thoughts and findings from the ArcherPoint staff. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.

Alan Campbell on the effect of Black Swans on project management:

Black Swans and the unknown unknowns. “Nicholas Nassim Taleb has discussed some of these problems convincingly in his books, Fooled by Randomness, and, more recently, The Black Swan. Black swans are ‘unknown unknowns’, those unexpected events that can cause grievous harm precisely because no prior consideration allowed for the possibility of their existence. After all, before black swans were discovered in Australia, everyone believed that all swans were white. Taleb argues that these black swans are the dominant uncertainties we need to worry about. The work in inherently nonlinear, full of complex system that are chaotic (in both the vernacular as well as the more technical mathematical sense) and do not behave in a nice, ‘tame’ fashion. We idolize the normal distribution, yet real events often have fatter tails and correlations seem to fail just when you want to depend on them. ”

Black Swan: “The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mind-set enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Platonism: “The belief that physical objects are impermanent representations of unchanging Ideas, and that the Ideas alone give true knowledge as they are known by the mind.”

“What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.” Nicholas Nassim Taleb

The Black Swan theory is important for project managers to learn. In our world, the Black Swan is introduced when a project goes sideways due to a surprise and does not conform to the 95% cost probability that we assign during estimation. A Black Swan is when something occurs outside of regular expectations, it has a major impact on the project and we fool ourselves into believing that we could have initially planned to side-set the problem in the first place. In an Oxford University study of 1200+ IT projects it was found that the average cost overrun was 27%, but one in six projects had cost over runs of 200%, which could have been from a Black Swan. What does this all mean for project managers? It means that there will always be surprises on projects that are unplanned, and you need to build in additional costs for unknown unknowns that are beyond the imagination of mere mortals.

Suresh Kulla referenced this article on running Windows PowerShell remotely:

Coffee Break – Window PowerShell Remoting

This article discusses ways to run PowerShell on remote machines in your network.

Alan Campbell shared this article on requirements modeling:

How important is the task of modeling requirements? This article discusses the significance of first performing  requirements elicitation and then modeling the requirements to ensure that all gaps are covered.

A Project Manager’s Guide to Requirements Modeling

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