THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700


[Submitted via Internet]

July 24, 1997                                             03 00050 97072402



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
                 Calculating Management Requirements
                 Coordinating with Stanford team

Ref:   a. Welch letter to Ray Levitt, Jul 23, 1997
          b. Ray's letter to Paul, Jul 24, 1997
          c. Paul's letter to Rod, Jul 24, 1997

Dear Paul,
Thanks for your email. This is an interesting area of inquiry. Possibly I can contribute to your efforts. My focus from work experience and research is on entropy in information and its impact on cost. Ray touched on this in a presentation to PMI last September on his VDT program, which is why I contacted him. I am pretty sure there are published studies of the error rate in communications, as cited in my letter to Ray.

Possibly folks in the psychology department and related fields at Stanford could provide an assist.

What probably has not been examined, but needs attention, is the rate of growth in errors in a project from inception as the number of participants and subjects grows. I suspect there is an exponential growth, like a cancer, most of it hidden from participants, since as you note, not all errors are critical. The Air Force Institute of Technology published a paper in 1975 that cited an entropic cost model which postulated that over time large information systems trend toward entropy. I summarize the concept from experience as management by "guess and gossip." A friend calls it "feel good management." Contacts at Intel, IBM, PG&E and so on, talk about getting 70 email a day. My "Feel Good Management" friend, who is a founder of an IT firm, suggested I develop a




Mr. Paul Teicholz                                   Page 2 of 2
Integrated Facilities Program
Construction Engineering & Management Program
Civil Engineering Department
Stanford University
Subject:  Communication Metrics
          Calculating Management Requirements
          Coordinating with Stanford team

calculation to show the rate of entropy in the information base, as a way to illustrate cost/benefits of adding a metric to communications so errors are discovered and fixed before they get into the information stream. He feels this would help executives overcome ignorance, fear and denial of a new work role to meet the exigencies of a new work environment, or what I call a "New World Order."

As I mentioned in my letter to Ray, initially, I would like to ground the analysis on published studies of differences in understandings among groups in common events like meetings. Ten or 20 people attend a meeting and are interviewed afterward. All tell a different tale. What is the percent of material divergence. How many people to they tell? What is the rate of divergence as a function of the number of participants, length of meeting, number of subjects, commitments. How much time do they spend arguing about who said what to whom the last time, and so on? What is the impact of investing time to "manage" information and preparing for meetings. As the number of errors goes up, how does this impact preparation time that then leads to more errors. I explain this general spiral toward a "black hole" problem in my paper "New World Order Needs Old Time Religion," but we need to quantify the problem with some solid research in order to overcome the power of denial in "Feel Good Management" practice.

So, if you can provide a lead or support on these matters, I would appreciate your help. Please advise if you would like to see the Corps of Engineers report on Communication Metrics. If you have other ideas on collaborating, I am open to hearing about them but am not sure how much time I will have available.

Sincerely,

THE WELCH COMPANY



Rod Welch


Enclosures

cc Ray Levitt for information