Decision Making

General technique · See it on the map

Guide only — An umbrella group; its members are the runnable ones.

The general term for how a group turns its options into one chosen course of action.

When to use it

More than one viable option exists and how the choice gets made — who decides, and by what rule — will affect whether the group accepts the outcome, not just what the outcome is.

When to avoid it

When there's really only one workable option — running a formal decision method to bless a foregone conclusion wastes the group's time and teaches them the process is theater. Also avoid it when the decision needs a specific accountable owner and a group method (voting) would diffuse that accountability instead of assigning it.

Steps

1. Decide who has authority over this decision before picking a method for it.
2. Pick the method that fits: voting when the group's buy-in matters and the options are few and clear, autocratic decision making when one accountable person needs to own the call and speed matters, multicriteria decision analysis when the options need to be scored against several weighted factors at once.
3. For a method with its own catalog entry — voting, autocratic decision making, multicriteria decision analysis — follow that entry's steps.
4. State the decision, who made it, and by which method, in the record.
5. Communicate the decision and its rationale to everyone affected by it, even those who didn't participate in making it.

What it produces

• A recorded decision: the choice, who made it, and the method used to make it.

Common pitfalls

• Running a vote to manufacture the appearance of consensus on a decision that was already made.
• Choosing multicriteria decision analysis for a call simple enough for a plain conversation, and burying the decision in scoring overhead.
• Not recording which method was used, so a later challenge to the decision has nothing to check it against.
• Letting the loudest voice in the room stand in for a method at all.

Worked example

Three vendors are shortlisted for the conduit installation. The choice affects cost, schedule risk, and safety record roughly equally, so the PM runs a multicriteria decision analysis scoring each vendor against those three factors with the client's stated weights, rather than picking the lowest bid outright.

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition. No clause number is recorded for it here — a guessed citation would be worse than none. An umbrella technique group PMBOK-6 names in many processes' ITTO tables across knowledge areas; its members carry the clause numbers, it does not.