Project Management Leadership: Building Creative Teams, 2nd Edition

Chapter 24

Decision Making

Learning Outcomes

After reading this chapter you should be able to:

• Understand the decision-making process.
• Understand the project leader’s decision-making continuum from autocratic to democratic.
• Understand the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) process.
• Understand Decision Tree Analysis.

Decision making is a companion process to problem solving, where problem solving is a process for analyzing the problem and identifying a number of feasible and technical solutions, and decision making is a collaborative process involving selection from a range of options or possibilities to gain collective support and team commitment for the most suitable solution. Ultimately, a decision is a commitment to action that authorizes the consumption of finite project resources.

The key considerations for each decision to be made are:

• What decisions are required?
• What will be a good outcome?
• When must the decision be made?
• What data must be collected to inform the decision?
• Who is involved and has the authority to make the decision?

Another key question to ask is when will it be clear that the decision is a good decision? It is important to know that a good decision has been made when making the decision. The only way this can be done is by adopting a good decision-making process.

There is some overlap with ideas already discussed in Chapter 23 on Problem Solving. The approach for setting objectives and gathering information is very similar.

Therefore, problem solving ...