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Assumption-based Planning
Assumption-based planning in project management is a post-planning method that helps companies to deal with uncertainty. It is used to identify the most important assumptions in a company's business plans, to test these assumptions, and to accommodate unexpected outcomes. Overview Conventional business planning works on the expectation that managers can extrapolate future results from past experience, but for new businesses and projects this way of planning is often not possible. Experience may be lacking or extrapolating from past experience may be misleading. Assumption-based planning methods include: * Critical assumption planning (CAP) by D. Dunham & Co. * Assumption-based planning by RAND : raises the visibility of make-or-break uncertainties common to new ventures by forcing managers to admit what they don't know. * Discovery-Driven Planning by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan. Assumption-based planning methodologies provided the foundation for other planning fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Project Management
Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. The primary constraints are scope, time, and budget. The secondary challenge is to optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and apply them to meet pre-defined objectives. The objective of project management is to produce a complete project which complies with the client's objectives. In many cases, the objective of project management is also to shape or reform the client's brief to feasibly address the client's objectives. Once the client's objectives are clearly established, they should influence all decisions made by other people involved in the project – for example, project managers, designers, contractors, and subcontractors. Ill-defined or too tightly prescribed project management objectives are detrimental to decision-maki ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Business Plan
A business plan is a formal written document containing the goals of a business, the methods for attaining those goals, and the time-frame for the achievement of the goals. It also describes the nature of the business, background information on the organization, the organization's financial projections, and the strategies it intends to implement to achieve the stated targets. In its entirety, this document serves as a road-map (a plan) that provides direction to the business. Written business plans are often required to obtain a bank loan or other kind of financing. Templates and guides, such as the ones offered in the United States by the Small Business Administration can be used to facilitate producing a business plan. Audience Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally-focused plans draft goals that are important to outside stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. These plans typically have detailed information about the organization or the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RAND
The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations, universities and private individuals. The company assists other governments, international organizations, private companies and foundations with a host of defense and non-defense issues, including healthcare. RAND aims for interdisciplinary and quantitative problem solving by translating theoretical concepts from formal economics and the physical sciences into novel applications in other areas, using applied science and operations research. Overview RAND has approximately 1,850 employees. Its American locations include: Santa Monica, California (headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Boston, Massachusetts. The RAND Gulf States Policy Institute has an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rita Gunther McGrath
Rita Gunther McGrath (born July 28, 1959 in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American strategic management scholar and professor of management at the Columbia Business School. She is known for her work on strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the development of discovery-driven planning. McGrath is also the founder of the innovation platforValize Life and work McGrath graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College in 1981 and earned a Masters of Public Administration from the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University in 1982. In 1993, she completed her Ph.D. at The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) with the dissertation, entitled ''Developing New Competence in Established Organizations'' consistent with her longstanding interest in corporate ventures and innovation. McGrath started her career working in government and the political arena and founded two entrepreneurial startups. After her graduation in 1993, she joined Columbia as as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robust Decision-making
Robust decision-making (RDM) is an iterative decision analytics framework that aims to help identify potential robust strategies, characterize the vulnerabilities of such strategies, and evaluate the tradeoffs among them. RDM focuses on informing decisions under conditions of what is called "deep uncertainty", that is, conditions where the parties to a decision do not know or do not agree on the system models relating actions to consequences or the prior probability distributions for the key input parameters to those models. History A wide variety of concepts, methods, and tools have been developed to address decision challenges that confront a large degree of uncertainty. One source of the name "robust decision" was the field of robust design popularized primarily by Genichi Taguchi in the 1980s and early 1990s. Jonathan Rosenhead and colleagues were among the first to lay out a systematic decision framework for robust decisions, in their 1989 book ''Rational Analysis for a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Implicit Assumption
A tacit assumption or implicit assumption is an assumption that underlies a logical argument, course of action, decision, or judgment that is not explicitly voiced nor necessarily understood by the decision maker or judge. These assumptions may be made based on personal life experiences, and are not consciously apparent in the decision making environment. These assumptions can be the source of apparent paradoxes, misunderstandings and resistance to change in human organizational behavior. See also * Assumption-based planning * Consensus reality * Hidden curriculum * Implicit attitude * Implicit cognition * Implicit leadership theory * Implicit memory * Implied consent * Leading question * Premise * Presupposition * Shattered assumptions theory * Subreption * Tacit knowledge * Unsaid * Unspoken rule Unwritten rules (synonyms: Unspoken rules) are behavioral constraints imposed in organizations or societies that are not typically voiced or written down. They usually exist in unsp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ABP Process
ABP may refer to: Companies * ABP Induction Systems, a global industrial firm * Associated British Ports, port operator in the UK * Ananda Publishers, or ABP Pvt. Ltd., an India-based publishing firm and media group * Au Bon Pain, a fast-casual bakery/cafe chain * Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP, a European pension fund for government workers in the Netherlands * ABP Group, Indian media conglomerate * Advanced Business Park, former redeveloper of Royal Albert Dock, London. Organizations * Afghan Border Police * American Board of Pediatrics, US certifying board for Pediatrics and several of its sub-specialties * Associated Baptist Press, a religious news agency * An Bord Pleanála, Ireland, rules on planning appeals Medicine and biology * Ambulatory blood pressure, a method to monitor blood pressure * Arterial blood pressure, the blood pressure in the arteries * Androgen-binding protein, a glycoprotein * Actin-binding protein, proteins which attach to the protein actin *Animal by-pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cells of a table. Each cell may contain either numeric or text data, or the results of formulas that automatically calculate and display a value based on the contents of other cells. The term ''spreadsheet'' may also refer to one such electronic document. Spreadsheet users can adjust any stored value and observe the effects on calculated values. This makes the spreadsheet useful for "what-if" analysis since many cases can be rapidly investigated without manual recalculation. Modern spreadsheet software can have multiple interacting sheets and can display data either as text and numerals or in graphical form. Besides performing basic arithmetic and mathematical functions, modern spreadsheets provide built-in functions for common financial a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Net Present Value
The net present value (NPV) or net present worth (NPW) applies to a series of cash flows occurring at different times. The present value of a cash flow depends on the interval of time between now and the cash flow. It also depends on the discount rate. NPV accounts for the time value of money. It provides a method for evaluating and comparing capital projects or financial products with cash flows spread over time, as in loans, investments, payouts from insurance contracts plus many other applications. Time value of money dictates that time affects the value of cash flows. For example, a lender may offer 99 cents for the promise of receiving $1.00 a month from now, but the promise to receive that same dollar 20 years in the future would be worth much less today to that same person (lender), even if the payback in both cases was equally certain. This decrease in the current value of future cash flows is based on a chosen rate of return (or discount rate). If for example there exists ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ceteris Paribus
' (also spelled '; () is a Latin phrase, meaning "other things equal"; some other English translations of the phrase are "all other things being equal", "other things held constant", "all else unchanged", and "all else being equal". A statement about a causal, empirical, or logical relation between two states of affairs is ''ceteris paribus'' if it is acknowledged that the statement, although usually accurate in expected conditions, can fail because of, or the relation can be abolished by, intervening factors. chapter 2 A ''ceteris paribus'' assumption is often key to scientific inquiry, because scientists seek to eliminate factors that perturb a relation of interest. Thus epidemiologists, for example, may seek to control independent variables as factors that may influence dependent variables—the outcomes of interest. Likewise, in scientific modeling, simplifying assumptions permit illustration of concepts considered relevant to the inquiry. An example in economics is "If t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Venture Capitalists
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth (in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc). Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for Equity (finance), equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky Startup company, start-ups in the hopes that some of the firms they support will become successful. Because Startup company, startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. The start-ups are usually based on an innovation, innovative technology or business model and they are usually from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology. The typical venture c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
