Ten Years of How to Measure Anything

by | Aug 3, 2017 | Announcements, Articles, Events, News, Uncategorized, What's New

On August 3, 2007, the first edition of How to Measure Anything was published.  Since then, Doug Hubbard has written two more editions, three more books, in eight languages for a total of over 100,000 books sold.  How to Measure Anything is required reading in several university courses and is now required reading for the Society of Actuaries Exam prep.

Over the years, Hubbard Decision Research has completed over 100 major measurement projects for clients in several industries and professions.  Clients included The United Nations, the Department of Defense, NASA, a dozen Fortune 500 companies, and several Silicon Valley startups.

Just since the first book, Hubbard Decision Research has trained over 1000 people in the Applied Information Economics methods.  HDR has also been given several new measurement challenges including the following:

  • drought resilience in the Horn of Africa
  • the risk of a mine flooding in Canada
  • the value of roads and schools in Haiti
  • the risk and return of developing drugs, medical devices and artificial organs,
  • the value and risks of new businesses
  • the value of restoring the Kubuqi Desert in Inner Mongolia
  • the value and risks of upgrading a major electrical grid
  • new cybersecurity risks
  • ….just to name a few

We have a lot going on in this anniversary year.  Here are some ways you can participate.

  • Have you been using methods from How to Measure Anything to solve some critical measurement problem?  Let us know your story.  We will be giving the top 3 entries up to $1,000 worth of How to Measure Anything webinars including your choice of any of the “Intro” webinars, Calibration training, and AIE Analyst training or time on the phone with Doug Hubbard.  Send your entry to HTMA@hubbardresearch.com by Friday, August 11.
  • We are continuing our research for a future topic “How to Measure Anything in Project Management”  If you are in the field of project management, you can help with the research by filling out our project management survey.  In exchange, you get a discount on project management webinars and a copy of the final report.
  • We are offering an anniversary special for books and webinars for a limited time.
  • See Doug Hubbard team up with Sam Savage in Houston and DC for our joint Probabilitymanagement.org seminars on modeling uncertainty and reducing uncertainty with measurements.

 

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Three Critical Project Management Measurements You Probably Don’t Track

by | Apr 10, 2017 | Articles, News

Sign up for a discount for the webinar “How to Measure Anything in Project Management” presented in person by Doug Hubbard.  Just take a project management survey, and you will also get the summary report of the survey findings.  See details at the end of this article.

Of all the project-management-related measurements a firm could make, there are three that are particularly critical and yet almost never measured.  Each of these are measurements my team have made many times across many types of projects even though some might consider these to be “immeasurable.”

None of these measurements are new.  Mature quantitative methods exist and have been applied to for each of these measurement problems.  Also, each of these methods can be done using nothing more than the statistical functions available in Excel spreadsheets and the methods are simple enough that we cover them in a training course that takes one day.

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NIST 800-30 still has defenders

by | Mar 4, 2017 | Announcements, News, What's New

Jack Jones, the inventor of the FAIR method for assessing cybersecurity risk, comments on a defense of NIST 800-30 by someone who commented on one of his blogs.  I take Jack’s side on this.  For those of you who have read my books, NIST 800-30 is one of the standards that promotes methods I spend a lot of time debunking (ordinal scales for risks, risk matrices, etc.).
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Evaluating Desert Restoration for the United Nations Environmental Program

by | Feb 20, 2017 | Client Focus

Hubbard Decision Research conducted an analysis on behalf of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) to determine the impact of restoring an overgrazed area of Inner Mongolia known as the Kubuqi Desert. Once a green pastureland, this area along the Yellow river was overgrazed and became a desert.  Over the last 30 years a Chinese corporation, Elion, has been working to restore this to a productive agricultural area with thriving communities.
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