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I wish as an industry we practiced quantitative risk management more. I run a small training workshop about producing better estimates, and the single idea that

I wish as an industry we practiced quantitative risk management more. I run a small training workshop about producing better estimates, and the single idea that I want people to take away is that a single-valued estimate is a really terrible shorthand for describing a probability distribution. If you describe estimates as ranges or distributions, a whole world of risk analysis tools open up - PERT, Monte Carlo, etc. More crucially, it allows you to start communicating and managing risk openly with everyone involved, instead of pretending it doesn't exist.

bobm_kite9 7y ago
Well I’m not going to disagree, obviously. The hard part is figuring out what these distributions look like. For example, in the summer I got an intern to build an app. It demoed well and people naturally asked when it would be in production. Working in quite a regulated environment, I knew this wouldn’t be as simple as just firing up a couple of EC2 instances, so I said a couple of months to get it live on the ‘internal cloud’. It still isn’t live. Maybe someone more experienced than me could have predicted that.