This article lists examples of questions that can be asked in your site in four different risk areas: portfolio management risk, individual program risk, competitive risk, and strategic risk. You can also assess impact because of the risk by asking related, but separate questions. Examples will be given below.
It is important to remember not to “over-engineer” who answers what question. Users will self-select what they feel they have enough knowledge about to participate.
Portfolio management is the selection and management of all of an organization’s projects, programs, and related business activities taking into account resource constraints. Crowdsourced forecasting can be used to help manage a portfolio of products and/or projects by proactively forecasting their ability to meet stated performance objectives, milestones, and budgets as input for resource allocation and strategic direction decisions. The following are some example questions clients have been asking in this area:
For larger, more capital or resource intensive projects, a formal risk management program is typically put in place as part of the formal responsibilities of a program management office. A risk management program compiles risk factors threatening the success of the program, tries to understand the likelihood of those risks, and offers mitigating steps to reduce the likelihood of those risks occurring. Typically this assessment is done on a periodic basis and involves outside subject matter experts “grading” projects and establishing mitigation recommendations. In contrast, a prediction market allows programs to ask about the likelihood of risk factors on an ongoing basis and involve the project team, consultants, outside subject matter experts, even value chain partners if desired. Here are some sample questions:
Competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization. At most companies, employees live and breathe competitors and market forces every day either because they are directly involved in product development efforts, are buyers of competing products in their personal lives, or worked at competing companies. Typically competitive intelligence in strategic planning groups is assigned to specialty analysis boutiques and consulting firms who may not be as familiar with your business as your own employees and business partners. Many of our clients have thus turned to prediction markets as a way to improve their collective intelligence processes. Questions about competitors are also relatively “benign” from a cultural perspective and may be more readily accepted at first than questions about business performance.
According to a Price Waterhouse Coopers "Barometer Survey" of 383 CEO's of privately held product and service companies identified in the media as the fastest growing U.S. businesses over the last five years, the most often used operational and financial metrics companies tracked were:
These examples track closely with the types of questions our clients are asking in their Forecasts site. For example:
Most larger organizations have a key performance metric guide tracked by senior executives. These are excellent documents to consult when thinking about what operational and financial forecasting signals should be queried as these documents are typically historical vs. forward looking. Financial statements for publicly traded companies, particularly the section on operational risk, may also be a source of valuable questions.
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