Strands of practice in OR (The Practitioner's Dilemma)

This paper is a first step towards a different way of looking at the practice of OR, with implications for practitioners and researchers alike. We make two key observations: (1) Looking at how OR practitioners perform individual projects will not lead to a full understanding of how OR practitioners perform individual projects. Instead, one has to take into account the series of preceding projects by that same practitioner, to infer and understand his or her ‘strand of practice’. (2) A practitioner's strand of practice is developed as the result of a learning process. Therefore, practitioners operating in different environments can have widely different strands of practice. Consequently, operationalizable guidelines about how to perform OR projects will have to include an indication of the strand(s) of practice for which they are valid. Our observations are based on an exploratory series of interviews with practitioners and their clients.