Politics and poisson distributions

Another day at the Large Retailer, trying to make headway on the project. Some progress, but if change in this organisation is like turning around a supertanker, then trying to get hold of the people you need to talk to in order to get the information that you need is like wading through the treacle that the supertanker is sailing through. While having nicely delineated channels of communications and business account relationships makes for great organograms, it doesn’t half get in the way when you simply want to cut across the silos in the business and get answers from people…

In the periods between meetings I started downloading some of the background papers - the ones with all the equations. Suddenly a highly-quantitative project doesn’t start to look like quite such a good idea - I can’t remember ever having met a Poisson distribution before, let alone understanding it. Something tells me I’ll know a whole lot more about them by the time this has all finished…

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