Project Manager Decisiveness

Exercise

Grab a piece of paper or fire up a word processor file and work your way through the following:

1. What types of situation do you think require quick, decisive decisions? What types are best handled by decisions based upon careful consideration of the available information about the issue?
   
   In answering these questions try to consider a very broad range of decisions that people in your kind of position have to make (and publicly declare), even if they’re not the final decision maker.
• Think across different decision content areas, like personnel decisions (e.g., hiring, promotion, job assignment, conflict resolution), program decisions (e.g., bid/no-bid, vendor selection, teaming, program strategic direction), project decisions (e.g., project management organization, budget development, problem resolution), decisions regarding office politics (yes, we all make them), career decisions, etc.
• Think across different situational contexts, like decisions made in periods of high stress and/or with competing demands on your time, decisions made in a very public setting or those made privately, decisions for which you have weeks to make them, or those which must be made in a matter of days, decisions made in areas in which you have competence or those in which you must rely on the expertise of others, etc.
• Think across decisions based on different levels or quality of information, like decisions for which there’s very little information to go on or those for which there’s an avalanche of information, or decisions in which the available information is unreliable or contradictory, decisions for which there’s good information that still leaves with one nagging question left unanswerable, etc.
• Think across decisions that have different potential impacts, like decisions that can result in a significant benefit to your project, your organization, your project staff, or your career. Think across decisions that could have a significant negative impact on any of those.


2. Based on all that thought you might have come up with a lot of factors that might impel you one way of the other on how you make a decision. If that’s the case, pull those factors together into two groups: a Quick Decision group (factors that together that would almost compel you to make a quick decision, even though more time was available to make it) and a Delayed Decision group (factors that together would compel you to take your time in making that decision).
3. First consider the Quick-Decision group. Can you identify three particular situations in which you had to make a decision in this type of situation? It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to think of a situation with all of the factors you’ve identified but try to come up with situations in which at least a few of them were in play.
4. Now do the same for the Delayed Decision group.
5. For each of the situations you identified in #3 and #4, consider the following:
• How did you actually respond? Did you make the decision on the spot or did you defer it to a later time? Did you in fact make quick(er) decisions when confronted with factors that you assigned to the Quick Decision group and did you take your time when making decisions involving the Delayed Decision factors?
• What were the positive and negative consequences of the approach that you took for each decision on the outcome of that decision, on your project, organization, and staff, and on yourself?

There are of course no stock, correct answers to these questions just as there’s no perfect way of making all decisions. There’s therefore no benefit in training yourself to any single way of making decisions. What is beneficial though is having insight into how you go about making project management decisions and what the consequences are of doing it that way. In the daily tumult of project management, our attention is inevitably focused on what we’re deciding while how we’re making those decisions usually goes without notice or consideration. Hopefully, this article has spurred some self-awareness in this area and has helped establish a basis for future development.