Reproducible Research for Management

The utility of reproducible research and literate programming methods in engineering and science is clear and well known by now but we seldom consider how the techniques might be extended to other disciplines. If, however, you think about what you’re trying accomplish with those procedures—documentation of process, tracking of changes, the ability to reproduce your work product and conclusions, and a self-contained file containing all the relevant data and calculations—it’s clear that almost any endeavor could profit from applying these techniques.

Derek Feichtinger has an interesting post in which he describes the application of reproducible research and literate programming to management problems. As an example, he considers generating a budget for a pair of related projects. His workflow is to first generate an outline describing his goal and the information he has and to refine that with subheadings as more information becomes available. That provides a history of the project and automatically tracks changes.

Feichtinger has written some Elisp that extracts the relevant data from the outline and puts in table form. That table can be used for further calculations, graphs, and other output. The results can, of course, be exported in a variety of ways according to what is needed.

If you are in management or you have to produce reports for management, you should take a look at Feichtinger’s post. There are a lot of good ideas in it even if you don’t choose to follow his exact workflow. As Feichtinger says, using these techniques is far superior to the usual management practice of doing everything with Excel.

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