For Quick Decisions, Use a Pro/Con List

  Agile   Decision Making  

A pro/con list is a quick and easy decision-making tool. It’s by far the fastest tool to use when considering go/no-go low-priority or medium- priority decisions. Deciding with pros and cons is a process you often do subconsciously. While you may not make the right decision every time, the pro/con tool can help you to be more right than wrong. The back of a napkin and the pro/con list go hand in hand, and this approach is most useful when there are only two options to consider.

The benefit of using the pro/con list is that it is quick, yet powerful. It can easily be used in meetings with customers or your team and it’s good for rapid decision making on the fly. In creating a pro/con list, you are more apt to capture most of the parameters that will influence the decision, and the act of jotting down these parameters means you have to think about them, thus creating some emotional distance between you and the decision.

The downsides are that this method often fails to directly consider the weight of your decision criteria, and it is limited to two options. Nevertheless, this is a tool many project managers readily use.

In using this tool, you should expect a quick outcome with a marginally better than 50/50 chance that you are making the right decision. The two options considered are likely closely matched, which is why a decision tool is needed in the first place. For …

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