Arizona State University

Decision Making in Relation to Project Management - Paper 1

Katherine Erickson

OGL 321 – Project Leadership

Professor Ben Pandya

October 25, 2020

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There are many factors that can make or break a project and that project’s level

of success. After reading A Project Manager’s Guide to Making Successful Decisions by

Dennis Buede and Robert Powell, Chapter 1, it is clear that not just average decision

making equates to successful projects, but strategic, planned, and thoughtful decisions

ultimately provide successful project outcomes. (Powell & Buede, 2009).

This chapter focused on elaborating on the importance of planning your

decisions as a project manager and how by being intentional and knowledgeable from

the beginning, you increase your chances of completing a project successfully. The

section titled “A Planned Process for Decision-Making” stood out to me in particular in

relation to the Harvard Simulation we were asked to complete last week. In my

experience working on the simulation, I found myself trying different techniques at

random, sometimes with no rhyme or reason to them. They would end up setting me

back or significantly altering the project, and I had difficulty figuring out why because I

was not intentional with the decisions I was making. This reading opened my eyes to

the significance of taking a step back to plan and put effort and thought into the

decisions before making them so that you are making the decisions that lead you to a

clear and successful ending. Before reading this chapter, I found myself asking why it

was so necessary to put so much effort into making the decisions beforehand when I

could easily just test it out and see how it went. Quickly, I realized that these small

decisions are crucial up front because what may seem like one small decision, can

ultimately have huge repercussions if you do not think about risk or contingency

management or the outcome of certain small decisions. In the text, we learn that

“Decisions entail a huge number of stakeholders; they necessitate the evaluation of

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conflicting objectives, risk, and uncertainty; and they may entail substantial financial

expenditures with long-term returns before success can be determined (Powell &

Buede, 2009). With so many components of a project, one slight incorrect decision can

be destructive to the project as a whole. I agree with the authors in the emphasis they

put on the importance of smart decision making.

Upon exploring the many different blogs that were listed in the UpWork

article on the top 25 project management blogs, I came across a blog that claimed to be

all about discovering why projects fail and figuring out how to recover from failures. The

blog is titled, “Back from Red Blog” by Todd Williams and the article I found on this blog

and chose to dive deeper into is called Kill the White Knight. When I first saw this title, I

was unsure of what a “white knight” was, specially in terms of project management and

projects. After reading this article, I discovered that a “white knight” is referring to a

person who is the hero that swoops into a failing project and who is able to save the

project and come out on top, rather than the bottom. (Williams, 2015). This article

describes the circumstance and scenario that failing projects typically follow, stating that

they do not happen overnight. In this scenario, when the project begins to falter, the

project manager, in order to avoid seeming weak in front of their supervisors, declines

to disclose the issue. Stakeholders who believe everything is going well do not exercise

precaution by double-checking with the project team. Finally, the project's scope,

schedule, or financial restrictions are breached to the point that the problem can no

longer be disguised. When a boss summons the hero to fix a project, everyone

worships him or her. (Williams, 2015). I felt that this concept and scenario was

specifically important to note and discuss for a few different reasons. When learning
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about projects and when projects fail, certain scenarios where projects end up being

successful yet lack successful planning or rely on a “white knight” to save the projects at

the end are not authentically successful. While they may look that way on paper, this is

a common problem that can continue to happen many times without fixing the real root

of the issue at hand. Williams, the author of the blog, ends his article explaining its title,

Kill the White Knight by explaining how this culture of a hero saving the project displays

a lack of leadership, both in the executive and intermediate management ranks, as well

as in the role of the white knight. Management fails to lead because it does not take

aggressive action, whereas white knights do not require leadership. In order to fix a

project, white knights treat the symptoms. They take on an issue with a limited scope

and the authority and autonomy to address it. (Williams, 2015).

In Chapter 1 of A Project Manager’s Guide to Making Successful Decisions by

Dennis Buede and Robert Powell, the authors touch on organized, planned, and

structured decision making. They state that in order to be successful, you must

establish and apply a reasonable, clear, or organized decision-making process (Powell

& Buede, 2009). Another blog I came across from the UpWork article was that of Tyner

Blain and a specific blog post titled Playing Whack-A-Mole With Risk. This specific

article is about making decisions and how assumptions can cause us to fail at times

because assumptions can often be risky. (Sehlhorst, 2017). This article references a

talk given by Laura Klein at the Lean Startup Conference that was about making

assumptions and the different types of risks that correlate to different assumptions.

Laura identified three different “classes of assumptions”. Here they are:

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“1. Problem Assumptions – we assume there is a market-viable problem worth

solving.

2. Solution Assumptions – we assume our approach to addressing the problem is

the right one.

3. Implementation Assumptions – we assume we can execute to make our

solution a reality, such that it solves the problem and we succeed.” (Sehlhorst,

2017).

The tip that the author gives in terms of his whack-a-mole reference in the title is to

consider analyzing the dangers to your product instead of discussing implementation

specifics. Determine if the risks are significant enough to merit making an expenditure to

mitigate them. Form a quantifiable hypothesis and test it (Sehlhorst, 2017). In the

Harvard Simulation we were asked to complete in week one of this course, I felt that this

knowledge would have been super helpful to consider. I found myself making choices

without real consideration, also known as assumptions, and without looking at the risks

that those assumptions could potentially cause.

In the future, I will attempt to be more thorough, organized and thoughtful when

making decisions and evaluating risks that come along with those decisions and try to

avoid assumptions that may cause problems down the line. Overall, it is clear and

proven just how important strategic, planned, and thoughtful decisions are and that they

ultimately provide successful project outcomes

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Bibliography

Powell, R., & Buede, D. (2009). Chapter 1, Good Decision-Making: The Key to Project

Success. In Project Manager's Guide to Making Successful Decisions.

Management Concepts.

Sehlhorst, S. (2017, January 8). Tyner Blain Blog: Playing Whack-A-Mole With Risk

[Web log post]. Retrieved October 25, 2020, from

http://tynerblain.com/blog/2017/01/08/whack-a-mole/

Williams, T. (2015, December 27). Back from Red Blog: Kill the White Knight [Web log

post]. Retrieved October 25, 2020, from

https://ecaminc.com/index.php/blog/item/457-kill-the-white-knight