Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management

Chapter 11Modeling and Improving Decision-Making Systems

Learning Objectives:

After studying this chapter, the reader will be able to do the following:

1. Describe characteristics of an organization that consistently makes good decisions (Chapter introduction).
2. Create a rich picture of an organization (Section 11.2).
3. Create a swimlane diagram of an organization (Section 11.3).
4. Create a root definition of an organization (Section 11.4).
5. Create a conceptual model of an organization (Section 11.5).
6. Identify models for representing a product development organization (Section 11.6).
7. List the steps in the Soft Systems Methodology (Section 11.7).
8. Describe an integrative strategy for improving decision-making systems (Section 11.8).

Organizations often perform poorly, unfortunately, due to problems with their decision making, which may take too long or be too contentious or generate bad ideas. For example, an engineering firm that does work for NASA, the Department of Defense, and other clients used a bid/no-bid process for determining whether to respond to requests for proposals (RFPs) that were issued by clients. The inputs are the RFPs. For each RFP, the firm's engineers did extensive research about the opportunity, gathered information, and evaluated, with respect to that particular RFP, the firm's resources, their experience, their competition, the expected time to generate a proposal, the potential revenue, and the strategic importance. This information was synthesized and ...