REPLY "Flawless Consulting" and SD (SD6627)

[SDMAIL Kim Warren]

Posted by  "Kim Warren" <Kim at strategydynamics.com>

My take on this is that SD provides a rigorous up-front architecture for
how things actually work, so that data collection seeks the appropriate
information. My impression is that others who use SD also place heavy
emphasis on the early mapping - which itself requires discussion with
participants in the situation. A common consequence of this is the
discovery that most of the data actually available is of no relevance,
and that some small key fraction of essential data does not exist - so
that data collection often has to include originating information the
organisation has never previously tracked.

I can't speak for how consultants in general approach the challenge of
embarking on data collection, but have come across everything from [a]
"give us everything you have got, and we will see what it tells us", to
[b] " we have this 'issue tree' of possible cause-effect structure of
the situation, so give us the data on the items in this picture", to [c]
"our hypothesis is that the causes of the issue are X, Y, Z ... So give
us data on that so we can show we are right".


Kim Warren
Posted by  "Kim Warren" <Kim at strategydynamics.com>
posting date  Mon, 17 Sep 2007 09:07:50 +0100