Making the best, practical use of analysis, is often far from straightforward. Less than half of analytics projects succeed. Professor Elliot Bendoly, of the Ohio State University’s Fisher School of Business, has been working with colleagues and industry professionals to advance a modern project-management framework, the OUtCoMES Cycle, which aims to avoid these lost opportunities. Read More
By providing a structured, evidence-based process to improve the effectiveness of projects, beginning at their fuzzy front-end, the OUtCoMES Cycle forces teams to rationalize their early scope decisions, ensuring they document that rationale, and motivating critical alternative choices, as well as both managerial and analytical perspectives for objectively assessing progress.
The OUtCoMES Cycle prioritizes what is known about the needs of stakeholders and end-users, matches those needs to the organization’s capabilities, and focuses on the ability to take actions that make the most of that match. It also directly advances inquiry to further flesh out that knowledge.
In contrast to other flywheel frameworks, the OUtCoMES Cycle distinguishes tenable intermediate and final objectives, advocates for the recognition of insurmountable challenges, and encourages teams to adjust assumptions and approaches when they occur, rather than sweeping things under the rug at the end.
‘OUtCoMES’ stands for Objectives, Utilities, Connections, Manifest, Explicate, and Scrutinize. Each represents a critical stage of analytical evidence-based project development.
From the start of a project, and throughout its progress, the Cycle highlights the need to clearly outline what the organization is attempting to achieve, as well as how to measure progress towards it. These constitute the project’s Objectives.
Utilities, in contrast, describe the levers available for pursuing those objectives, both managerially and analytically. In both of these early stages, realistic assessments of data availability and its documentation are critical to ensuring viability in the analysis and informed prescription. Best practice in such documentation involves the use of a specialized Systems-oriented A3 framework designed with the OUtCoMES Cycle specifically in mind.
Connections detail the interplay between Objectives and Utilities. Contemporary cause-and-effect diagramming, such as Relative-impact Fishbones, allows teams to sketch out and informally hypothesize what they expect to see in the association of Objectives and Utilities, prior to formal modeling.
The Manifest stages of activity involve rendering a select set of Objectives, Utilities and Connections into coherent analytical model forms, while the Explicate stage involves the computational and statistical extraction of estimates from those forms, along with interpretation and practical insight.
While implied in all stages, the OUtCoMES Cycle further highlights the need to Scrutinize insights developed throughout analysis and any associated proposed solutions, assessing their practical relevance, prior to advancing to subsequent stages. This interest in rapid scrutiny and adaptation is a hallmark of the OUtCoMES Cycle.
As a result, the framework provides an invaluable contemporary resource for organizations that wish to use evidence-based approaches to tackle both existing and emerging complex challenges.
