VA and CBA. These two acronyms cover my activities for the last two days: I participated in a Value Analysis that included Choosing By Advantages.
Director's Order #90 requires that any NPS construction project costing more than $500K must undergo value analysis. DO90 was, in large part, a response to the $330-thousand toilet scandal at Delaware Water Gap.
For our value analysis this week, an architect and an exhibit designer created 3 alternative, rough plans for a new building and exhibits at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. To select the "preferred alternative," we followed the Choosing By Analysis system, a proprietary process specified by the Director's Order.
Don't worry, I won't go into detail. Sufficient to say that we both a) assigned numeric value to characteristics of each plan and b) employed technical terms like "pizazz" and "ugly." As practiced by the facilitator, the process mixed order and chaos, earnestness and goofiness.
I didn't like the building design chosen by the group, but the exhibit scheme we selected seemed like the best one.
Groups of people. It's still hard for me to believe, sometimes, that anything gets done successfully by groups of people.
Director's Order #90 requires that any NPS construction project costing more than $500K must undergo value analysis. DO90 was, in large part, a response to the $330-thousand toilet scandal at Delaware Water Gap.
For our value analysis this week, an architect and an exhibit designer created 3 alternative, rough plans for a new building and exhibits at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. To select the "preferred alternative," we followed the Choosing By Analysis system, a proprietary process specified by the Director's Order.
Don't worry, I won't go into detail. Sufficient to say that we both a) assigned numeric value to characteristics of each plan and b) employed technical terms like "pizazz" and "ugly." As practiced by the facilitator, the process mixed order and chaos, earnestness and goofiness.
I didn't like the building design chosen by the group, but the exhibit scheme we selected seemed like the best one.
Groups of people. It's still hard for me to believe, sometimes, that anything gets done successfully by groups of people.
*Sir Alec Issigonis, the Turkish-born designer of the original Austin Mini, has been credited with the adage, "A camel is a horse designed by committee."
.
Comments
Post a Comment