Project Selection To: Fill & Download for Free

Most engineers don't need full on economics unless a basic econ. class was part of their general studies.Now, most industrial engineers have some sort of engineering economy course, to help determine things like pay back periods when accounting for depreciation.So, some aspects of economics may be useful for some engineers, most will benefit more by learning project management, which ironically discusses basic project selection methods (cost/benefit ratio, etc).

Here is the formal definition form Wikipedia:a murder board is a process where a committee asks questions from project representatives as part of the project selection processIn other works, the point of a murder boards is to kill “bad” ideas, by selecting on promising projects to move forward.Under ideal circumstances, you will have more ideas than you could ever reasonably implement. Therefore, you need some selection mechanism to pick the most valuable.Ideally, of course, there would be a dispassionate method to select them based on a score. Methods like “rate of return” or “cost/benefit ratio” attempt to do this, but many are based on “projected” earnings or saving, still making them subjective.Lean projects will often use a pareto analysis to make the top issues somewhat easier, which is great as long as a data itself is good.Again, sometime the differences between two candidate projects is small, so a “murder board” selection can pick one and move forward.Remember that projects are supposed to forward a companies’ strategy, so “murder Boards” keep to be focused on that. But often, that’s the weak link in the chain.And these guys lost sight of what the purpose a “murder board” is for…

Our eldest son was selected to travel to Myanmar/Burma to work in a monastery teaching street children. This had come about as a direct request from the head monk after he had watched video interviews of over 1000 different applicant from round the world (he’s an incredible Bhuddist teacher and very venerated in Myanmar)This was the first year of the international project as Myanmar is still only slowly opening up to western tourists outside the ‘typical hotspots’A huge honour.Our son has two mums. Myself and my wife.This is Myanmar’s legal state of play regarding LGBT people:“Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights in Myanmar are subject to official persecution and discrimination, with LGBT people facing legal and social challenges not experienced by others. Same-sex sexual activity is illegal and section 377 of Myanmar's Penal Code 1861 subjects same-sex sexual acts (regardless of whether they were consensual or done in private) to a term of imprisonment from ten years to life.[2]Heterosexual anal intercourse and oral sex are also illegal. Transgender people are subject to police harassment and sexual assault, and their gender identity is not recognised by the state.”(apologies for the wiki link!)So, not a place you want to be LGBT. Not somewhere you want to risk accidentally holding your wife’s hand as you watch sunrise over Bagan and certainly not a country where you would want to get intimately acquainted with their prison system.We arrived at the airport to see our son off. 3 others had been selected to travel out there with him. We met up with the other parents (a VERY white, middle class, yummy mummy type meet!) and the discussion rapidly turned to which month different parents were planning on travelling out there to see their offspring.Janet and I hesitated when we were asked when we would be going.“We won’t be going. It’s not safe for us as a gay couple”Absolute silence.In their heterocentic world it had never occurred to them that our son was travelling to a country we couldn’t go to. I doubt it had ever occurred to them that there were 70+ countries that we would never feel safe to travel to.I don’t think many straight people think about the fact that my world as an openly LGBT happily married person is far smaller than theirs as a straight, happily married person.