Construction Engineering & Management Program
Civil Engineering Department
Terman Engineering Center, M50
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305 4020

July 24, 1997



Mr. Paul Teicholz
Integrated Facilities Program
Construction Engineering & Management Program
Civil Engineering Department
Terman Engineering Center, M50
Stanford University
Stanford, CA  94305 4020

Subject:  Communication Metrics
                 Measuring Communication Errors

Paul -

This is quite closely related to Beyond CPM.  I am totally strapped for the
next few weeks, but thought that, since you will be heading up this work
next year if we are successful with NSF, you might like to respond to Rod's
message?




There may be some synergy here.

Sincerely,


Mr. Ray Levitt, Ph.D.





>X-Sender: rowelch@pop3.ibm.net (Unverified)
>Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 15:24:02 -0700
>To: "Levitt, Ray" 
>From: Rod Welch 
>Subject: Communication Metrics
>
>Ray,
>
>How are things going with VDT?
>
>This past year I did a contract for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and they
>have published a government evaluation of my work methods and technology
>called "Communication Metrics."  It includes a scope of services to define
>this new work role.  We are currently negotiating further work.
>
>I am preparing a calculation of overhead or management expense for projects,
>which typically would be the Project Manager and related staff.  I want to base
>this on the volume of communications that occurs, since managers tasks are
>meetings, calls and documents.  The idea is to set an error rate in
>communications as a function of the number of subjects, participants,
>commitments, complexity and compression (or "burn rate") of the work.  It
>occurred to me you may have developed some statistics or other information and
>ideas that could support this form of "bottom up" analysis.  Typically
>management is assumed to be a percentage of direct costs, but this crashes due
>to increased information flows.  I want to show the gradual transformation
>over the course of a project where management winds up working more on fixing
>prior mistakes than on the original requirements.
>
>Dr. Tom Landauer, who is a cognitive scientist, provided a paper he prepared
>with a colleague that says "meaning" that people draw from common events is
>often signigicantly divergent. But I have not been able to develop any
>baseline numbers that says 10 people in a meeting where 20 subjects are
>discussed and 25 commitements made, will result in 10% errors, or 20% errors,
>etc.  Does your work shed any light on this?
>
>Rod
>