Technology in Banking and Finance

Earlier i n Part 1 I talked about Anchor bias at play in bid management, Agile poker planning and a sales situation. In part II of this series I share my opinion on Authority and Availability bias at play in estimations. Authority bias is the tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure (unrelated to its content) and be more influenced by that opinion. It is a conditioned bias that make us ‘believe’ individuals dressed as  doctors talking about a particular toothpaste brand, people seeming like police, lawyers or government authorities talking about law, Senior or management though non-technical make better technology or project choices !  In order to make short cuts  & make easier choices as humans we implicitly follow authority.      Have you seen the technology choices and solution direction changed because the management wanted Jack to review the solution ?  ‘Mr Jack of all  ‘ lacks ma...

Game of roulette: Software development effort estimation  - Part I - ‘K nowing software effort estimation is more about biases and human misjudgment’ can help us make better decisions  Software effort estimation is by definition ‘mapping the unknown’, an approximation game. There are various techniques to estimations including processes like WBS, analogy based estimation, poker planning, models like expert estimations, group estimations etc. The consensus among industry practitioners is techniques, process and tools when used well and topped with right reviews should create reasonably accurate estimations. This is far from the truth ! The role of human biases and influences on development effort estimations is accepted, but they are not widely discussed or accepted. Effort estimations are actually fertile grounds for human misjudgment.        "Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalising animal” - Robert A. Heinlein For exa...

[Mental models and its application for better product management decisions] It is very common that companies who outsource product development to external IT service providers expect that they help the company reduce product development uncertainties by being true partners i.e. charter unknowns technology landscape by taking risks alongside, understanding unknown technical choices, trying them out and recommending what would work best in the project. In IT services parlance, this concept is sold to the customers using fancy terms like skin in the game, extended arm of customers, true partners, etc etc.  Most often this arrangement never works, we almost always hear the disappointment from the product managers that a particular service provider is not adding value, they just are not up the curve to be able to provide the right technical choices to be made and at best they execute what is being told to them and thats about it.   Expecting an outsourcing IT service ...