Skip to Main Content
Engineering Project Management
book

Engineering Project Management

by Neil G. Siegel
August 2019
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
424 pages
15h 3m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Engineering Project Management

8Drawing Valid Conclusions From Numbers

Invalid data and poor statistical methods can lead to bad decisions! There are many ways for an engineering project manager to make mistakes, but one of the most common and most insidious is through making logical and procedural mistakes that cause us to draw erroneous and invalid conclusions from quantifiable data, and as a result, making poor data‐based decisions. As engineers, we measure things, and then we often make decisions based on those numbers. For example, we predict when our project will be done, how much it will cost when it is done, and what the technical capabilities of our product will be (e.g. how far will our new airplane be able to fly safely without refueling). And we use those data to make decisions for our project. Whenever we use numbers, however, there is a chance for error: our measurements always involve uncertainties, a particular assumption is only true under certain circumstances, we may not have collected appropriate samples, and so forth. In this chapter, I show you the most common ways that we undermine our own credibility through poor data collection, errors in logic, procedural mistakes, weak statistics, and other errors, and how you can instead use valid methods and strong statistics so as to create credible predictions for all of our project management roles and measures.

8.1 In Engineering, We Must Make Measurements

We are engineers … and, as part of our job, we routinely measure things. Qualitative ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Project Management

Project Management

Jeffrey Pinto
Hybrid Project Management

Hybrid Project Management

Cynthia Snyder Dionisio

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781119525769Purchase book