website paiken:research

Project Decision Analysis Context: Summary

by Bill Girling

The goal of this effort has been to examine a real business situation with the management decision analysis tools and techniques made available through an academic course of study. It is desirable that practical lessons about analyzing the business situation and developing insight into managing the critical success factors be formulated. As a guideline for accomplishing this goal, I followed the "Decision Analysis Process" displayed on the next page.

Through this process, several major benefits have resulted.

The structured examination of a very complex issue has helped management to establish the potential role of each project objective and focus on the critical success factors.

With the decision tree, a dynamic mechanism for monitoring the impact of future events and focusing on elements that may affect the success or failure of the project has been developed.

By enrolling the subjective elements of management into the "project model", the communication of the financial, functional and previously unaccounted for, intuitive elements that determine or influence the projects outcome, has been clarified greatly.

While the probability modeling devices developed as part of the analysis will be subjected to continuing validation, the insight gained through this exercise have produced viable, practical results and the analysis goals have been accomplished.

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Navigate from here: returning to the project home page, or jump to another part of the decision analysis case study (Situation Description, Possible Decision Outcomes, Decision Analysis, Constructing & Linking The Uncertain Events, Decision, Summary) - or jump to Peter Aiken's home page, download some reengineering articles, or access other reengineering links.