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Out on a LIMSThe Blog for People Who Risk Life and LIMS on a Daily Basis

More on Setting Expectations

Volume IIEntry 32 of 90 in 20151 min read5 comments ↓

Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.

Recently, I made a post regarding setting expectations:
http://outonalims.com/2015/06/10/setting-expectations/

I'll give my usual warning that I try not to take the blog statistics too seriously but, based on the number of hits to my blog after that post came out and so many that were specifically on that particular post, I wonder if that topic hit a nerve. Is it that so many people realize that's a problem and want to read more about how to solve it? It's difficult to determine that just from the spike in readership and the spike could be a fluke - totally unrelated to the topic.

However, I do get the impression that project managers and project teams are always concerned somewhat about this so I tend to think the topic probably did happen to be somethings of specific interest to readers. While there are many topics that cause a spike in the statistics when I post them, this is one of the occasional ones where the spike is significantly higher than the usual spikes.

If you're a new project manager or a new project team member and you were reading these wondering, "Do I really have to bother setting expectations?," then, yes, you do have to (or suffer the consequences)!    :-)

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/

The conversation

5 comments from 1 person, June 25 to June 26, 2015. Gloria replied 3 times.

  2. Gloria MetrickAuthor

    It's quite possible, thank you. Even with the statistics showing links coming in and links going out, it's not always easy to tell exactly where readers come from.

  3. LiMS Journal (@LIMSjournal)

    Yep, I spend a lot of time analyzing web traffic logs and I can say I have found lots of errors and omissions in traffic logs that do not catch a lot of things and yet we take these logs and analytics as gospel and then proceed to draw conclusions that are simply wrong. You just cannot trust anything unless you test it from all sorts of angles.

    It's funny what people believe in that is just totally wrong. This phenomena gives rise to the cliche... perception is reality. It does not mean it is right, it just means that a fiction is real for some folks.

    1. Gloria MetrickAuthor

      What a coincidence that you mentioned "perception is reality" as I was just reading "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator" by Ryan Holiday. Even though I think a lot of us are aware of how internet stories get out of hand and rumors quickly become "news" and purely invented stories become the "truth" it's still eye-opening to read the details about how much that has become the case. Actually, even for someone as jaded about it as I am, some of it is actually pretty hard to stomach.

      1. Gloria MetrickAuthor

        Actually, and just to be a little charitable about this, I think that when you first start looking at all these numbers, if you're not a numbers person, that it's easy to fall into whatever they offer. I think it's easy for someone who doesn't know better to see high hits and think, "Hey, look at those high numbers - I really AM #1 in LIMS!" At least, that's how I imagine their over-optimistic internal conversation going.

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