Decision Making Techniques

DECISION MAKING

Decision making involves the ability to negotiate and influence the organization
and the project management team. Some guidelines for decision making include:

• Focus on goals to be served
• Follow a decision-making process,
• Study the environmental factors,
• Analyze available information,
• Stimulate team creativity, and
• Account for risk.

Voting. Voting is a collective decision-making technique and an assessment process having multiple alternatives with an expected outcome in the form of future actions. These techniques can be used to generate, classify, and prioritize product requirements. Examples of voting techniques include:

• Unanimity. A decision that is reached whereby everyone agrees on a single course of action.
• Majority. A decision that is reached with support obtained from more than 50% of the members of the group. Having a group size with an uneven number of participants can ensure that a decision will be reached, rather than resulting in a tie.
• Plurality. A decision that is reached whereby the largest block in a group decides, even if a majority is not achieved. This method is generally used when the number of options nominated is more than two.
• Autocratic decision making. In this method, one individual takes responsibility for making the decision for the group.

Multicriteria decision analysis. MCDA is concerned with selecting optimum solution involving multiple criteria. Typically, there does not exist a unique optimal solution for such problems. It could correspond to choosing the "best" alternative from a set of available alternatives.
Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is a general framework for supporting complex decision-making situations with multiple and often conflicting objectives that stakeholders groups and/or decision-makers value differently.

Interpersonal skills

INTERPERSONAL AND TEAM SKILLS

Summary version:

• Conflict  management.  Ensure  that  conflicts  are  resolved in a timely manner.
• Cultural  awareness.  Communicate effectively by considering cultural differences.
• Negotiation. Used to achieve support for project and to resolve conflicts.
• Observation/conversation. To stay in touch with the work and attitudes of stakeholders.
• Political awareness. Understanding the power relationships within and around the project.
• Active listening. Reduces misunderstandings, improves communication and knowledge sharing.
• Facilitation. Guide a group to a successful decision, solution, or conclusion.
• Leadership. Communicate the vision and inspire the project team to focus on the appropriate objectives.
• Networking. Allows informal connections and relations to share information.

Detail version:
Conflict management. Conflict management can be used to help bring stakeholders into alignment on the objectives, success criteria, high-level requirements, project description, summary milestones, and other elements of the charter.

Facilitation. Facilitation is the ability to effectively guide a group event to a successful decision, solution, or conclusion. A facilitator ensures that there is effective participation, that participants achieve a mutual understanding, that all contributions are considered, that conclusions or results have full buy-in according to the decision process established for the project, and that the actions and agreements achieved are appropriately dealt with afterward.

E.g. Workshops  Can build trust, foster relationships, better communication & early issue discovery can lead  to  increased  stakeholder  consensus. Examples:

• Joint  application  design/development  (JAD).  Used  in  the  S/W  industry.  Focus  on  bringing  business  subject  matter  experts  and  the  development  team  together to gather requirements and improve the software development process.
• Quality function deployment (QFD). Used in the manufacturing industry, helps  determine  critical  characteristics  for  new  product  development.  QFD  starts  by  collecting  customer  needs, also known as voice of the customer (VOC). These needs are then objectively sorted and prioritized, and goals are set for achieving them.
• User stories. Describe the stakeholder role, who benefits from the feature (role), what the stakeholder needs to accomplish (goal), and the benefit to the stakeholder (motivation). As an Editor, I want to review content before it is published, so that I can assure it is optimized with correct grammar and tone.

Meeting management. Meeting management includes preparing the agenda, ensuring that a representative for each key stakeholder group is invited, and preparing and sending the follow-up minutes and actions.

Active listening.  Active listening helps reduce misunderstandings and improves
communication and knowledge sharing.

Leadership. Leadership is used to communicate the vision and inspire the project team to focus on the appropriate knowledge and knowledge objectives.

Networking. Networking allows informal connections and relations among project stakeholders to be established and creates the conditions to share tacit and explicit knowledge.
Networking is interacting with others to exchange information and develop contacts. Networks provide project managers and their teams with access to informal organizations to solve problems, influence actions of their stakeholders, and increase stakeholder support for the work and outcomes of the project, thus improving performance.

Political awareness. Political awareness helps the project manager to plan communications based on the project environment as well as the organization’s political environment.

Conflict management.

Influencing. An influencing skill used in this process is gathering relevant and critical information to address important issues and reach agreements while maintaining mutual trust.

Motivation. Motivation is providing a reason for someone to act. Teams are motivated by empowering them to participate in decision making and encouraging them to work independently.

Negotiation. Negotiation among team members is used to reach consensus on project needs. Negotiation can build trust and harmony among the team members.

Team building. Team building is conducting activities that enhance the team’s social relations and build a collaborative and cooperative working environment. Team building activities can vary from a 5-minute agenda item in a status review meeting to an offsite, professionally facilitated event designed to improve interpersonal relationships. The objective of team-building activities is to help individual team members work together effectively.

Communication styles assessment. A technique used to assess communication styles and identify the preferred communication method, format, and content for planned communication activities. Often used with unsupportive stakeholders, this assessment may follow a stakeholder engagement assessment to identify gaps in stakeholder engagement that require additional tailored communication
activities and artifacts.

Cultural awareness. Cultural awareness is an understanding of the differences between individuals, groups, and organizations and adapting the project’s communication strategy in the context of these differences. This awareness and any consequent actions minimize misunderstandings and miscommunication that may result from cultural differences within the project’s stakeholder community. Cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity help the project manager to plan communications based on the cultural differences and requirements of stakeholders and team members.

Meeting management. Meeting management is taking steps to ensure meetings meet their intended objectives effectively and efficiently. The following steps should be used for meeting planning:

• Prepare and distribute the agenda stating the objectives of the meeting.
• Ensure that the meetings start and finish at the published time.
• Ensure the appropriate participants are invited and attend.
• Stay on topic.
• Manage expectations, issues, and conflicts during the meeting.
• Record all actions and those who have been allocated the responsibility for completing the action.

Observation/conversation. Observation/conversation is used to stay in touch with the work and attitudes of project team members and other stakeholders. AKA job shadowing.

Data Gathering Techniques

Data Gathering Techniques:

PMBOK 6th version defines 6 groups of ITTO's across 49 processes.

1. Data Gathering techniques - Qty 9 tools & techniques
2. Data Analysis techniques
3. Data Representation techniques
4. Decision-making techniques
5. Communication skills
6. Interpersonal and team skills

In all there are 72 tools and techniques categorized under these 6 groups.
Apart from these, there are 60 more ungrouped tools and techniques.

There are several data gathering techniques covered in PMBOK  –

1. Bench-marking
2. Brainstorming
3. Check sheets
4. Checklists
5. Focus groups
6. Interviews
7. Market Research
8. Questionnaires & Surveys
9. Statistical Sampling
10. Facilitation

Bench Marking:
This is the practice of comparing current or planned processes or practices to the best available (in the organization or in industry) in order to measure performance, assess gaps, and identify opportunities to improve.

Brainstorming:
Brainstorming is a technique is used to generate ideas, and to come up with ways of solving a problem.

Brain writing. 
A refinement of brainstorming that allows individual participants time to consider the question(s) individually  before  the  group  creativity  session  is  held.  The  information  can  be  gathered  in  face-to-face  groups or using virtual environments supported by technology.


Check sheets:
Also known as Tally sheets, Check sheet is a form to collect real time data at the location where the data is generated. This is then used to analyze and look for patterns that give us insights – such as source of defects generated.
Here’s an example of data recorded to identify telephone interruptions in Radiology Department.




Checklists:
This is, by far, the most well-known and used technique. This can even be used as a reminder tool (the TO DO app we use in phone)! Checklist is simply a list of items, points, or actions to be considered in the context of validation or getting work done.



Focus groups:
As the name suggests Focus group is a group of pre-qualified set of people that come together to provide information about an event, product, result, process, or result. Participants are prepped with agenda of the discussion in advance. Focus group is moderated by a moderator who asks series of questions to elicit response from people.

Interviews:
This is a technique to get information from a stakeholder with personal on-on-one discussion. It could be formal or informal in nature. There is no strict rule that the interview happens between two people – interviewer and interviewee. Sometimes there could be multiple interviewers/interviewees.



Market research:
Researching market is about studying market for specific information we are interested in, about a product, service, or solution. This information can be extracted by scouting the internet, picked up from industry publications, collected at trade fairs, or purchased from market research companies.
Questionnaires and surveys:
These are a set of questions carefully put together to accumulate response from a large group of people about a particular topic. This can be used when audience is geographically dispersed, when information needs to be collected quickly, and the depth of information needed is not critical.

Statistical sampling

 

Statistical sampling is the process of selecting a subset (called Sample) from the total population in order to verify the quality of entire population.

This technique is useful to avoid destructive testing, or in cases where testing or inspection costs a lot.

Take for instance, that you have a contract to produce 10,000 shirts. You manufacture, individually inspect, iron, fold, pack, and package them all. They are ready for delivery. And the customer wants to make sure that there are no defects.

How does she do it?

One way is to open each of 10,000 shirts and checking for defects.

This will lead to,

• additional cost (unpacking, and packing)
• additional time
• additional effort (individual inspection)

The alternative is to choose a sample size of say 1000, and have a threshold of say 100 shirts. This means that you randomly choose 1000 shirts and inspect them all. If you find defective shirts less than 100, then you accept the entire lot. If the defective shirts count is over 100, you simply reject entire lot of 10,000 shirts.