Overview:
HiPPO, the acronym for “highest paid person’s opinion”, is the manager who pops into your project at the last moment and offers an opinion on what to do to make the project, or product a success. This may or may not be a great idea.
So many times, data-driven decisions are sidelined by the highest-ranking person in the room’s experience and insight. In many instances, this is ok. In others, it’s not. When a HiPPO is in the room and a difficult decision needs to be made but there’s not data or data analysis to determine the right course of action one way or another, the group will often defer to the judgement of the HiPPO. And more and more frequently, decisions not backed by data are guiding your organization in the wrong direction. But how does this change.
In this discussion, we will examine how you can depersonalize decision-making and make the decision about facts, not what the HiPPO thinks. We will investigate healthy conflict, and respectful interjection with meaningful data.
Topic Areas:
- Examples of bad data-driven behavior
- History of data decision making
- Data analysis tools and their use
- How to build your own data arsenal
- Soft skills approach to data
- A simple data visualization demonstration
Michael Roberts
Vice President, Sales and Marketing
Michael Roberts is an IT industry professional with more than 25 years of experience in bringing software to market. His industry certifications and accreditations include those from ICAgile, Cisco, CompTIA, Microsoft, Atlassian, GitLab, and the Scaled Agile Framework. With his experience as a technology executive, he’s guided many companies to successful IT and software projects.
