Decision-making is a process that can be managed proactively. The Plan Decisions process provides a simple, yet powerful method of identifying, in advance, the critical decisions that must be made for your success. This process produces a Decision Network that serves as a decision management framework. The Decision Network provides a Decision Breakdown Structure (DBS), an overall analysis plan that is tuned to your project goals and constraints. Within this framework, open decisions are prioritized and a realistic, executable Decision Plan is defined for each.
Planning decisions at the beginning of a project will enable you to focus your precious data gathering, analysis, and decision-making resources on the decisions that are most critical to your success. The development of a Decision Breakdown Structure will guide the development of your Work Breakdown Structure, linking to the activities necessary to make your decisions. The DBS will also prioritize the decisions indicating the order in which work activities must be completed.
The steps of Decision Planning are:
▪ Identify a set of discrete decisions
– typically 10-50 critical decisions are identified for the plan
▪ Develop a decision network
– this provides the interaction between decisions and is the basis for decision management
▪ Set priorities
– based on importance and interaction
▪ Prepare decision plans
– As these decisions will be assigned a lead, guidance about the decision must be communicated