The topic area I which to explore is project management, as a subset of management. The Project Management literature is, like management, full of differing opinions on what’s right and suspect truisms. While it may change, my current intention is to analyse the quality of current theory underpinning ‘best practice’ as proscribed by organizations such as the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Office of Government and Commerce (OGC) and the US Department of Defence (US DoD).
My early analysis model (as in what I have been mulling over the last few weeks) could be simply represented as a table and potentially published as a wiki or similar online resource for practitioners. Maybe it could be something I could product-ize and sell?
I have the idea of something like a table where columns represent the packets of theory as related to practice areas and rows represent the spectrum of theory from the current dominant paradigm (say the top row) to a an opposite or divergent one and at this stage I am guessing that there is some sort of consistent scale I could use like maybe the age or size of the host organization, or the control mechanisms used within an organization, or even market dynamism. But at this stage, I really don’t know and this neat presentation idea may go out the window.
What do you think? Any suggestions? Anything you’d like to see researched?
About 10 years ago a colleague (who has long gone on to research) used graphs to build a network of claims and theories and then used an algorithm to detect the contradictions and to determine the largest consistent subset of theories. He applied that to a number of topics in medical research to demonstrate how you could come to a consensus.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately I lost contact with him - last time I heard he was at SFU Vancouver.