I’ve made too many decisions today, resisted too many desires (except that brownie at lunch, I caved and ate the brownie :D), to write this post as well as I wanted to tonight, but here it is anyway. Have you heard of decision fatigue? This is the feeling, and reality, of simply running out of…

I’ve been thinking about professional development quite a bit lately. Since for me that includes a great deal of work around better supporting data use (or being an advocate for actionable data), I thought a blog post to summarize what I’ve been up to, am planning, and aspire to do might be of interest to…

This coming winter, I’ll be teaching a Quantitative Analysis course for the accelerated online MBA program at Marylhurst University. I last taught this course in Spring 2012 and really enjoyed it. I learned a lot from the experience — teaching online comes with unique challenges, and it’s good for me to have to manually calculate…

Methods Are Not Metrics  I spent the past couple of days in evaluator meetings where the primary topic was the development of a set of common metrics. To be honest, I was surprised at the number of evaluators who weren’t sure how to write a metric. Below, I outline three mistakes I saw being made…

Or, where the rubber meets the road. From late April to mid-May, we ran the revised survey that I first began posting about here, and then again here. And we’ve done a little reflecting on how things have gone so far. What have we learned so far…. First, that nothing is ever perfect the first,…

Small town: A community of people smaller than a town. (Source: http://www.thefreedictionary.com) In many US states, residents of rural areas feel like second class citizens compared to their metropolitan counterparts.  Political activities and results tend to reflect the opinions and activities of city folks, the majority of goods and services are located in cities (even…