6 ms·
Delphi Method
- minitoar 6y agoSounds very much like story point estimation that my team does all the time: “The objective of the method was to combine expert opinions on likelihood and expected development time, of the particular technology, in a single indicator.”
- flixic 6y agoMost point estimates I’ve been a part of have not been anonymous. Have you had a different experience?
- minitoar 6y agoNo, but as far as I can tell that’s not a requirement for the Delphi method.
- judofyr 6y agoAnonymity is the first “key characteristic” listed and I can’t find any mention on this page that it is optional for this method. EDIT: Looking more into it, it seems that it went from "Delph method" to "Wideband delphi" to "Planning poker", and it's in the last step that the anonymity requirement disappeared. Very interesting! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_delphi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_delphi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker
- minitoar 6y agoCharacteristics are not requirements. Anyway, my original claim was that it was similar not identical.
- slindsey 6y agoA company I was at 20 years ago did a variation of this for software estimation. It resulted in some good discussions. It wasn't anonymous as mentioned here. When one person on the team says an element will take one week and another says 8 weeks, there are fundamental differences in assumptions that need to be worked out. That was the good part of the process. The bad was when the Project Manager doesn't let the process play out and simply takes the shortest of the available estimates.
- leetrout 6y agoSounds like an unstructured planning poker?
- andrewem 6y agoIt’s wideband Delphi, which predates planning poker by several decades. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_delphi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_delphi Edit: as I recall from doing estimating using wideband Delphi circa 2004, the main differences with planning poker as I see it practiced today are that estimates were in real time like days or weeks, and votes were collected and displayed anonymously, though as you would expect there was temptation for people to de-anonymize their own votes.
- leetrout 6y agoAh interesting! Thanks for the link. Everything old is new and the cycle continues.
- sergiotapia 6y agoThat's just planning poker.
- faichai 6y agoThis triggered my PTSD with regards to project managers. People whine about agile and scrum etc. but what they don’t realise is that the biggest benefit of those processes was that they replaced project management led, waterfall based processes. Waterfall failed for many reasons, but one of them was because you’d get asshole project managers constantly taking minimal estimates exactly as you describe and then applying pressure on individual devs when they overrun the minimum estimates. One of the biggest contributors to developer happiness and productivity over the last 20 years has been to escape this tyranny.
- datavirtue 6y agoCould this be the solution to the pain of trying to discuss a complex topic in zoom meetings? I kept thinking we should use parliamentary procedure or something but this sounds like less friction and it is mostly what we are already doing but with a little bit of structure. A Jamboard delphi session perhaps.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- astrea 6y agoMy university uses this to predict COVID spread: https://delphi.cmu.edu/about/ https://delphi.cmu.edu/about/
- wcerfgba 6y agoThis research group does not seem to be using the Delphi method described in the OP Wikipedia article, it just has the same name.
- astrea 6y agoFair, my mistake. I only lightly read the post I'll admit.
- jsherwani 6y agoVery cool, how does the team use this method as part of its prediction process? (Also: Roni, the head of this research group, was my PhD thesis advisor more than ten years ago!)
- thereticent 6y agoYears ago we used this method with a group of neuropsychologists and physicians to develop an algorithm for clinical decision support for traumatic brain injury and PTSD evaluation at the VA. It helped provide validation of a 3 question screener that would get veterans to the right services while not burdening other vets with an hour long evaluation appointment. The screener is still in use today AFAIK. The Delphi process itself was a cool experience and allowed a lot of "cooler" analytical thought whereas committee meetings tend to have problems with egos and hot takes.
- samat 6y agoClicked here expecting some heart touching Object Pascal reveries. Not this time.
- rini17 6y agoI have heard about this method in the context of group manipulation - "to be delphied" i.e.: https://anticorruptionsociety.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/delphi-brochure2.pdf https://anticorruptionsociety.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/de...
- centimeter 6y agoThis is pretty funny. It sounds like some governing bodies the author of this document is familiar with have inappropriately used this forecasting procedure as a governance procedure. This is totally something I can imagine some bright-eyed local politics midwit doing.
- travisjungroth 6y agoThat pamphlet is wild. It reads as really paranoid, but I totally agree with it. It seems like Delphi isn't at all resilient to being run by bad intentioned people. This make it terrible for something like setting public policy. It doesn't make it worthless, though. If you had a 20 person company where ownership was legitimately interested in getting the best answer to the problem, maybe this is an efficient way of doing that.
- NotPavlovsDog 6y agothanks for sharing, that was a great find.
- 1123581321 6y agoI got a kick out of the sensational tone. I’ve seen this pattern at many public meetings for spending road improvement budgets and the like. There certainly is no deviation from the plan based on anything that happens in these meetings. However, the participation by the lower level facilitators is more fairly described as work-a-day rather than malicious.
- lowdose 6y agoSounds a lot like reading the comment feed on hn. A panel of experts that have better forecasting abilities than FANG combined.
- RootKitBeerCat 6y agoNote: decentralized oracles don’t work, because that middle step of talk / signal doesn’t happen
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoI was excited until I discovered this method requires a committee.
- bluetwo 6y agoThey don't have to be in the same physical location as long as you have a means to consolidate feedback.
- ant6n 6y agoNot to be confused with Methods in Delphi http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Sydney/en/Methods_(Delphi) http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Sydney/en/Methods_(...
- petr25102018 6y agoI first learned about the Delphi Method from the book Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art. Although I have not used it in practice yet, I like the concept, especially for some more difficult (bigger) estimation tasks, so I am mentioning it in my book besides other "group estimation techniques". It is true that this is basically async "planning poker".
- bluetwo 6y agoI first learned about it when a client hired me to write software to support this method for use in pharmaceutical planning and marketing. Very useful if done correctly.
- adam 6y agoWe do a version of this with our clients, where we use our forecasting software and host a "live" forecasting session. We make people forecast "cold" on something: likelihood of hitting milestones, competitive intelligence, industry trend, whatever, and then have someone come in and give a talk on what we've asked people to forecast. We follow that up with more forecasting and get to see if people were influenced by the expert or not. Perhaps the most valuable part is the discussion after making that second forecast. We identify a lot of bias and assumptions people were making that they then learn from the next time they have to make a forecast like that.
- ksaj 6y agoI use this method for interviewing executive, technical and operational groups in security audits. It's much easier to dig down to the truth.