Julie has decided to gather opinions from a group of external consultants, via a short questionnaire, who are experienced with these types of projects within the publishing industry. She’ll then show them an aggregated list of the whole group’s answers, and ask them if they want to change theirs.What best describes the technique Julie is utilizing to gather valuable information for her project?
Explanation
Answer: c - The Delphi method leverages panel of independent experts. These experts answer questionnaires anonymously, and then the answers are shared amongst the entire group. Once the experts have reviewed the opinions of others, there is another questionnaire that encourages them to change their answers based on having read the opinions of their peers. These experts should begin to converge on an answer that serves as a nice approximation.
Root cause analysis is a technique that looks at all factors closely to try to uncover the primary cause of an issue.
Interviewing involves questioning participants to get pertinent project information, while brainstorming is an off-the-cuff process that relies on people gathering together to throw out random ideas.
Key Takeaway: The Delphi technique is a very effective way to estimate an expert consensus. Whatever the techniques used to gather information, it is imperative for Project Managers to properly document the outcomes of these techniques, and to share those results with the other project participants. In that way, you have many more neurons reviewing the information for potential risks.
However, the Delphi technique tends to be time-consuming, so it is generally used for very important estimates on projects that tend to be larger in size.
