In the most basic terms, the aim of decision-making is to minimize surprises. Considering and weighing many kinds of information before making a decision isn’t just good practice, it actually correlates to business performance.
“The strategic performances of businesses are underpinned by decisions, and the cost of poor decisions can be high.”
–“Maximizing Strategic Value from Megaprojects” by John Eweje et al.
What can you do to actually improve decision-making in your organization?
- Collect good data. Research shows that information quality directly impacts the decision quality. Ideally, project data should be collected at all stages and used to predict success, track progress, measure performance, forecast, demonstrate strategic alignment, and prepare for obstacles.
- Create visual data. Visual displays and data-evaluation methods help us communicate and shape our strategic thinking by illustrating complex multi-dimensional decision factors in simple terms, and in turn help our attention, agreement, and retention of strategic information.
- Build scenarios. Scenarios are one of the most useful renderings of immense quantities of information and visual data. These what if propositions are used extensively and flexibly in a wide variety of business applications to cognitively underwrite the strategic process.
Project Portfolio Management is a complex matrix of strategic decision-making. Because the multi-project environment is ever-shifting, PMOs need all the structures and support possible to make crucial decisions about project funding, prioritization, and allocating scarce resources.
For more ways that your organization can leverage data and scenarios to enhance decision-making, download our full white paper, “Strategic Decision-Making for Dynamic Project Portfolio Management.”
Abstract: Project Portfolio Management today must be highly responsive, especially because decisions on project priority and funding directly impact organizational success. PPM decision-making, however, is a deeply complex process with many environmental and human factors that can either boost an organization’s bottom line or derail it. When we understand PPM as a dynamic, sometimes even volatile process, requiring constant flexibility, it’s clear that we must enhance and support the PMOs’ decision-making in as many ways as possible. The decision-enhancing strategies presented in this paper have all demonstrated the positive organizational impact of continuously gathering and strategically incorporating data into every decision.
ProSymmetry was founded in 2007 by passionate resource management experts. Since then we have continually strived to solve the resource management challenges that slow down, damage, and overwhelm organizations. We do this through our flagship product, Tempus Resource, which is used by Fortune 500 companies like Siemens, Airbus, Qualcomm and DELL, and was labeled a “resource management solution accessible to the masses” and was awarded the 2016 Cool Vendor by Gartner.
