Seth Gordin has a nice post about Deliberately Uninformed. We had a conversation today around the conference room table, while working the cost and schedule integration for an upcoming Integrated Baseline Review.
One topic, while taking a break from the arduous work efforts of keyboarding all the gory details of $87,000,000 worth of work into the various database repositories, started like this...
Hey, there is this guy that says he's an expert at Earned value Management.
Really? Can we find him through Goggle? Has he written anything on the topic that we can find that might help us? How about speaking at the local PMI, AACE, or other professional chapter? Or maybe does he have a paper that we can find somewhere? Where has he worked that they used EV? Did this EV work include being "validated" by the Defense Contract Management Agency? Does he have a process for applying Earned Value to our specific problems we're trying to solve around this !@#$'ing table all day long? Has he actually worked a program recently where EV was the "killer process," that took the program out of the ditch and put into back to GREEN?
You know silly questions like that?
No, then why are we thinking this guy is an expert? Not that not having all these things doesn't make you an expert, but it sure would be nice to find some reference to a person's credentials on a topic. OK, he only worked on classified programs, never joined PMI, never spoke or wrote a word about his domain, happens all the time. But then the final question.
Anyone know somebody who knows this guy?
No, not even with 2 or 3 degrees of separation? How can he be an expert without SOME visible evidence of expertise that we could check out? Might happen. But Seth's got a point. Access to knowledge is largely unimpeded. Forget the middle class (not really sorry). We use it all the time. But access to knowledge leaves breadcrubs. Comments on Blogs, emails, conference attendee lists, stuff like that.
We're going to have a "high level expert" vistor next week, A guy from the government, who was introduced as an expert on a program controls topic. 45 seconds we found him on Google - after correclty spelling his name. Found his presentations, credintials, papers, and job history. Yep, he's a heavy hitter. Ah crap, we've got to get our PMB (Performance Measurement Baseline) in better shape to impress him, we want to look good.
Never heard of the other guy caliming to be an expert? Maybe a self proclaiimed expert is just that "self proclaimed?
