Every week on DartCannon we give a rundown on the week including what we’ve written, are reading, and major imporvements. I won’t cross-post all of them, but will put them up every so often.
Happy Friday! Here’s a rundown of this week in DartCannon
What We Wrote
- Accepting an Estimate - DartCannon is about creating simulations of complex business problems, but once the simulation is done the work of getting buy in starts. We shared some pointers of how to approach those conversations and potential pitfalls to look out for.
- The Curse of Parallel Tasks - It is so easy for our intuition to lead us astray as problems get complex. Here we show how you can be fooled even in the simple case of tasks with equal estimates performed in parallel.
What We’ve Been Reading
- If you only know one thing about Risk Management… (J. Goodpasture, Musings on project management) John is always good at bringing complex ideas back to fundamentals. Evidentially coupling of projects is on everyone’s mind, as we wrote about parallel tasks, John wrote about the importance of schedule slack where it is unavoidable.
- Real-world Monte Carlo analysis (Cook, M. S., Paper presented at Project Management Institute Annual Seminars & Symposium, Nashville, TN) It likely comes as no surprise that we’re slightly geeky around here, so no one should be shocked that we read this conference paper from 2001. Great if you’re looking for a more rigorous review of the application of monte-carlo analysis, the simulation method underlying DartCannon.
DartCannon Change Spotlight
We are constantly continuing to improve DartCannon and while the majority of changes are too small to call out, we want to highlight larger improvements.
Excel Import Enhancements
In addition to overall performance improvements to XLSX import and export, we’ve added some smarts to the import process. Now, DartCannon will automatically attempt to identify which sheet contains your items and risks AND try to identify what each column represents.
Excel import/export is a Pro feature, so you need to subscribe to take advantage.
An end-of-week quote:
A goal without a plan is just a wish - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Hope everyone has a great weekend!
See something you think we’d like to share? Send an email to weekly@dartcannon.com or connect on twitter, @dartcannon