Difficult Decisions

 

In projects and in life, difficult choices come up all the time.

I had a schedule conflict with the PMI North America Global Congress this year. This year I was going to do a joint presentation again with the PMI New Media council, where I would have been speaking specifically about implementing Kanban with virtual teams.

The conflict was a local conference regarding education and advocacy for disabled children and adults. I'm very active in this area and was recently appointed to the South Dakota Council on Developmental Disabilities. Attending the RehabACTion & Transition Conference would be educational for me and help me do a better job in my role on the council.

What To Do?

As project managers, we are also faced with difficult decisions all the time. Here are some helpful techniques I use on a daily basis to make decisions.

Engage Team Members and Encourage Dissenting Views

One of the most important things you can do is listen to the opinions of others who have a stake in the decision and know something about the options involved.

Even if the final decision is yours, listening to diverse perspectives on the topic helps clarify your own thinking. The Vatican used to have a 'devils advocate' policy where someone was assigned to get as much 'dirt' on a candidate for the Papacy. This encouraged dissenting views.

On my teams, I've found in some cases I need not actively pursue dissenting opinions. One of my teams just has the culture of personalities that everyone makes their own views known and are not afraid to pronounce them aggressively. This is awesome, but not all teams gel like this naturally where everyone is friends and pokes fun at each other, etc.

On another team I do have to actively seek out dissenting views. My favorite technique for this is to read the tone and body language of team members when discussing a decision that needs to be made. I select a few who I think may not like my preference by asking them directly but with a gentle smile, "[name], I would like you to tell me why this is not the right decision. I want to know why this is a bad idea, because it might be."

It can take new teams awhile to adjust to this, because almost no project manager actively seeks out dissenting views. They will likely be hesitant at first, and may even feel like you are picking on them. With a new team, I will sometimes tell everyone ahead of time that I want them to come up with at least 1 reason why each option is a bad idea. I do the same. Then we share our negative opinions of each option. This makes the team comfortable with voicing their opinions by demonstrating that I value their input, regardless of whether they agree with me or not.

The most dangerous thing a project manager can have is a team of 'yes' people.

Write It Down

I also love the process of writing down pros and cons of each option in a decision.

The act of writing it down helps me ensure I've thought thoroughly about each option. In many cases I discover questions I hadn't thought of previously when I go to write the context, pros and cons of each option down.

Specifically, I like to think in terms of value. What value is added or taken away with each option? If you don't use something like value-added as a criteria, you can still end up deciding on what 'feels' better, which is a bad idea. Human intuition can be great, but it goes wrong with complex decisions more often than it goes right.

In The End

I decided that I'll add more value to the world by attending the disabilities conference than I would by presenting and attending the PMI Global Congress. It was a difficult decision still, but I'm confident I made the right one.

My team members in this case were my wife and some close family members. When I wrote the options down, it became clear the primary benefits for attending the PMI conference were networking with people there and the prestige of speaking again at a large project management conference. However, the majority of the people I interact with at the PMI Congress are not engaged with my target audience for pmStudent, which is new and aspiring project managers. The majority of the companies and people in this space focus on things like delivering PDUs, consulting for companies, etc.

When it was written down, it became evident that I can add more value at the disabilities conference - especially in terms of value to others. So while I'm sorry to miss this year's PMI event, I'm also confident I've made the right decision.

Will you leave a comment and tell me how you make difficult decisions?