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.