Three Keys to Smart Decision-making

Ty is a work management evangelist; "accidental" project manager and marketing veteran with over 25 years of experience.

  Communications Management   Strategy  

Making decisions is part of project management. There, I said it.

I once had a very experienced project manager tell me that his job was not to make decisions, his job was to execute on the decisions of others. Although I can understand why he might say that, I think my friend missed the boat. In many organizations, the project manager might not make decisions about which potential projects get pursued and which don’t; decision-making is part of what project leaders (and project team members) do every day. Projects are really a series of decisions about priority, approach, the team, the timeline and more. In organizations where project managers and team members don’t make decisions, it’s no wonder projects languish and often fail.

A couple of years ago, I heard Fraser Bullock--the Chief Financial Officer of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City--talk about the decision-making framework he used to empower his team with decision-making authority. It didn’t take long for it to become obvious to Bullock that the hundreds (if not thousands) of decisions that needed to be made on a daily basis made it impossible for any one individual to tackle alone. Making any attempt to filter every decision through a single person would create such a bottleneck that nothing would get done--which would have proven disastrous to those Winter Olympics.

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