When it comes to decision making on projects, there are many suggestions of how to go about it. Brain storming, using a "mind manager" tool, one of my favorites. Analytical Hierarchy Process, Paired Comparison Analysis (Borda Ranking), and then of course there's the false notion that decision making means decision making by one person - the Project Manager.
But there needs to be some more background here before we get to the punch line.
In Berstein's Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, the statement
Measurement always dominates intuition: rational people make choices on the basis of information rather than on the basis of whim, emotion, or habit. Once they have analyzed all the available information, they make decisions in accord with well-defined preferences. They prefer more wealth to less and strive to maximize utility. But they are also risk-averse in the Bernoullian sense that the utility of additional wealth is inversely related to the amount already possessed.” (Bernstein 1996, p. 246).
Is the starting point for use Sherlock to guide project management decision making. The books shown below in their orginal first edition, first issue, and together sell for $25,000!
Sherlock Holmes considers there are three "Powers" needed for a good detective. From The Sign of Four, published in Lippincott's Magazine, London February 1890.
- Observation
- Deduction
- Knowledge
So how does this translate into decision making for the Project Manager. Just as in The Sign of Four, Holmes makes use of these three powers to solve crimes. A PM can make use the same three powers to make decisions on the project.
- The Power of Observation - means you have data and observational information about the project. Cost and Schedule data. Technical performance measures. Measures of Effectiveness (the customers view). Measures of Performance (the providers view). Defect rates. Risk retirement rates. Other measures that reveal attributes of the project, including the "capacity for work" of the people working on the project. Then of course the best measure of all - Earned Value measured in Physical Percent Complete.
- The Power of Deduction - means that with this data, you can develop information about the project from the data. You're late and over budget is the obvious deduction from the data. But more subtle deductions might be that the architecture of the system is not robust enough to support the demands on performance.
- Knowledge - means that with observations and deductions, you can use your knowledge to make decisions. This knowledge comes from past decisions, past performance, lessons learned, subject matter experts, outside advice, working examples. But it does not come from guessing and making things up because they sound logical, our they popped into your brain, or the worse of all, you read them in a book and that book made a conjecture about how to make decisions but did not provide the observation and deduction processes.
