What the world needs…
No. Start that over again.
What WE need is a simple fact-based framework for getting the best truth we can about the world we live in.
For many years, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have been engaged in investigative journalism. Their faces are very familiar because they appear on many newscasts such as CNN and NBC. They are sought after repeatedly for their very thorough analysis of evolving news including interviews with Washington, D.C figures who make the news every day. They helped unravel the Watergate mystery in the early 1970’s. Today they are engaged in helping us unravel questions around the foreign involvement in our election process and the figures principally engaged in that entanglement.
When asked about their methodology, they always remark that they are working to get the “best obtainable version of the truth.” That is what investigative journalism is all about. It is “fact-based” and not “opinion-based” or “emotion-based.” That is exactly what the new Framework attempts to do in my book Project Management Lessons Learned: A Continuous Process Improvement Framework.
This Framework is applicable to all scenarios, not just those associated with projects. This Framework uses Fact, Deliverables, and Perspectives to give a good overview of what really happened in a specific scenario.
- Deliverables in a broad scenario are the tangible things that result from the scenario.
- Fact are those pieces of information that are not refutable in the given situation.
- Perspectives are different viewpoints that participants in the scenario perceive. Often these perspectives must be reconciled by discussion to get the best obtainable “version of the truth.”
This Framework very much mirrors the investigative reporting that Woodward and Bernstein are famous for.
The Framework also makes it very easy to incorporate Risk Management into the analysis. Since the Framework is very “performance-based,” it uses the After Action Review questions in its procedure:
- What was the Expected Result?
- What was the Actual Result?
- What is the Gap?
- What is the Lesson Learned?
My Framework has been employed successfully by some major organizations, such as the Panama Canal, to uncover details of past projects and business situations.
I encourage readers of my new book to utilize the Framework when trying to analyze scenarios to do their own investigative reporting for their environments. This is a powerful Framework and often requires the use of “facilitation” techniques or “reframing” of the scenario details in order to provide results that can be shared with others. Both facilitation and reframing are topics covered by my book and the reader can research these tools for their own use.
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