When will the food remains hit the mechanic airflow manipulator?!
If you're in project management, you probably have a good gut feeling that tells you whether to buy champaign or headache medicin whenever you get a new project. This is of course a combination of experience, social/political factors etcetera.
This makes me extremely skeptical of initiatives like the one below. Especially the assumption that project management and project risk management are based on metrics is flawed. It's all based on soft human factors. How is the political climate? Do the stakeholders know what they want? Are you going to be able to be in the drivers seat or do you have to be passive?
Non the less, all this experiental factors are not measurable, and thus you can't defend them based on evidence. That's why it's vital that we do try to get to reasonable metrics.
A great way, in my opinion, would be to get a huge set of possible metrics, and then apply them to historical projects. See how the metrics would have looked during those projects. Then map that against the project outcomes and find out which real key variables made the difference. I'm willing to bet that the results are not what we might expect, Freakonomics style.
This paper is an interesting thought experiment, but not very useful in reality.
