Every week we collect articles from around the web related to probability and estimating in a business context.

With some of the team on vacation, this time it is two weeks in DartCannon - enjoy!

What We Wrote

• My First Monte Carlo - DartCannon makes Monte Carlo simulations easy to use in a business context. In this blog post, we break down this complex tool so you can understand how it works.
• Introducing Correlated Outcomes - It isn't everyday we get to introduce a major new feature! This week saw the introduction of Correlated Outcomes, a powerful tool for modeling complex simulations.

What We've Been Reading

• With Goals, FAST beats SMART (Donald Sull and Charles Sull in MITSloan Management Review) We're big on goals here at DartCannon and how to track progress, so there has been a bit of discussion around this article. One thing that stood out to us is what is shared between FAST and SMART - the 'S' for 'Specific'.
• Black Swans (G. Alleman on his blog Herding Cats) Everything Glen writes immediately goes on our 'must-read' list and this post is no different. We plan to tackle the application of black swans ourselves at some point, but this is a good discussion of how people get wrapped up in low probability events that they stop doing planning. Well worth a read.
• A new study compared formal and informal communication at work, and the results are no fun (O. Stanley at Quartz) Here's the key quote:

  ...informal communications channels come with a cost. Manufacturing systems that use formal methods of communication, like meetings with set agendas and required participation, are more efficient and have fewer errors than those that rely on emails and phone calls.

DartCannon Development Spotlight

We are constantly continuing to improve DartCannon and while the majority of changes are too small to call out, we want to highlight larger improvements.

We already highlighted that this week saw the introduction of Correlated Outcomes, but there are other minor changes as well!

Cleaner New Simulations

A new simulation used to be full of warnings, with every part of the results complaining that it couldn't show anything. We've now cleaned that up so a fresh simulation is more of a blank canvas, ready to be created.

Improved Simulation Settings

Adding Correlated Outcomes to simulation settings (accessible via the menu when editing a simulation) caused us to redesign the settings dialog. It had been pretty cluttered so to add the correlation properties necessitated a cleanup. It should be much nicer to use now.

Pro Badging

Previously, if you did not subscribe to a paid plan, you wouldn't always know when an action would ask you to subscribe it you'd hit a limit. Now, we have consistent markings for which features require a paid plan so it should never be a surprise.

An end-of-week quote:

“Acquiring Data Retires Risk.” - Glen B. Alleman

See something you think we'd like to share? Send an email to weekly@dartcannon.com or connect on twitter, @dartcannon

Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash