Can you share your experience or other stories that lead to the use of a factual evidence-based approach to every decision-making in your or any Project? Saving Changes...
Moving from "gut feel" to evidence-driven decision making is usually the result of leadership influence and/or experience from the school of hard knocks when a team has been acting without evidence.
The key with project decision making is to know when there is sufficient evidence to act responsibly which often means we don't have complete information.
Kiron Saving Changes...
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Shimonkepha,
in my view, we humans and certainly leaders and project managers, make most decisions unconsciously, and not strictly evidence based. Available information, as Kiron says, is often insufficient anyhow.
Processes, algorithms, plans and procedures are means to try to automate decisions based on available information (is it always evidence?). As an example, on a GOLIVE over a weekend, we planned the fallback to be triggered at noon on Sunday if certain conditions were not met at this time. And so it happened, but not before we checked our guts.
Human decision making is not often rational and logical, it reflects on experiences and values, which helped us to survive in evolution.
If you strive for a evidence based approach only, you may end up in bureaucracy and disaster.
Although all decisions may be evidence based, they are rarely based on evidence alone.
In the PMI triangle, technical is largely focused on turning data into actionable information. Strategic often involves using other data analysis such as potential market share impacts from decision paths. Leadership requires evaluation of personal behaviors and motivations where communication leads to evidence.
Evidence is what is known, and there are always many unknowns (nobody can see the future), so the analysis of evidence usually requires interpretation. EVM for example tells us about variances, but not about how we respond to them. When using that data as evidence of performance, the decisions themselves require professional judgement.
I often remind people that as PMs who report on many aspects of our projects, our real value is the interpretation of the data. It is not merely being able to collect data and display it in attractive formats, or following some type of decision tree. Saving Changes...
