Project management: can experts alone validate instructions for beginners?
Alongside equipment or a service, a project often delivers instructions that seem obvious to their authors. The management question is specific: is expert approval enough to declare those instructions usable by someone encountering the task for the first time?
What the literature establishes
Pamela Hinds (1999, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied) studied how people with different levels of expertise predict the time beginners need to complete a task. Under the conditions studied, experts underestimated that time more than less experienced participants did. The finding does not directly concern instruction quality, but it challenges a common assumption: mastering a task does not guarantee an accurate appreciation of its difficulty for others.
The mechanism: information that is hard to forget
Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber (1989, Journal of Political Economy) experimentally investigated the “curse of knowledge”: possessing information can distort one's assessment of the judgements made by people who lack it. Their study concerns economic settings, not the writing of project procedures. It nevertheless offers a relevant mechanism for developing a hypothesis: informed authors may treat as explicit steps that beginners still have to discover.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that experts should be excluded from writing instructions. That would conflate two functions: ensuring technical accuracy and checking whether a reader can act using the document alone. Expertise remains necessary for the first; the second calls for a separate test, whose rationale is consistent with these studies but was not directly demonstrated by them. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits of the evidence and of routine validation
These experiments cannot quantify the errors that instructions might cause in a hydropower, hospital or tourism project. Nor do they demonstrate that a test with a beginner would be sufficient to make a procedure safe or compliant. Conversely, a review by specialists may confirm the accuracy of the content while leaving its usability without assistance unexamined.
A practical check in Sion
As part of the “Project Management” programme at SHR — Swiss Human Resources, an exercise in Sion could focus on instructions relating to hydropower, healthcare, viticulture or alpine tourism, carried out in a simulation without exposure to risk. Following technical approval, a member of the intended audience who is unfamiliar with the task would try to complete it using the document alone; an observer would count requests for clarification and steps requiring intervention. After revision, another person with a comparable level of experience would undertake the same test: the measure would be the proportion of steps correctly completed without help, with a record kept of interventions. This comparison would provide a local usability check, not causal proof or a replacement for safety validation. To go further: explore the Project Management training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Project Management in Sion
- project management
- Sion
- research
- training sion