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Knowing What You Know
What you don't know is easy: go find it out. But I've found that what you do know can cause all sorts of problems. Here's a good example: recently we had a member of a real-estate consulting firm come by and try out the MAT. I set him up with a PMBOK assessment (That's an assessment based on the Project Management Body Of Knowledge -- one of the big players in the PM world) What came back was frankly confounding.
Looking at the MATGrid, it was all just reds and blues, which is normal when you only have one participant (nothing to average out). The respondent didn't pick anything as being too bad or too good -- everything was just a little bad or a little good. To the unaided eye, it was all so much about nothing, and I'm sure that the person taking the assessment wasn't able to see outlying areas either. The MAT, however, pulled out a couple areas that scored poorly: Formality in Risk Management and Formality in Human Resource Management.
It would be interesting to ask this person what he thought of the answers? Many times the things we all know are the things that we really don't know: poor requirements are our problem; poor scope management is killing us. These are all great areas, and perhaps they need attention, but it is just as likely that underlying issues are rearing their head and these are actually the symptoms, not the cause. For instance, too many meetings (too much formality) in requirements gathering can cause development to start while requirements are still being baselined. Poor requirements will get the blame, but it was really poor process quality that hurt the most.
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