How Project Managers Can Improve Their Strategic Decision Making
Four ways project professionals can make better decisions — and ensure their project’s success.
Project professionals frequently make strategic decisions that can change the course of a project — and its outcome. That can be a lot of pressure. But following these tips can help improve your strategic decision-making skills and will help your next project achieve the desired results.
Understand the project’s objective.
Too often, project managers start a project without properly understanding why that project is being undertaken, according to Reuben Oshomah, West Africa regional director at telecom Avanti Communications in Lagos, Nigeria. Instead, he says, the project is done in isolation.
“If you don’t have that information of what exactly is the reason you’re doing that project, then you’re going to have a challenge in making the right decision,” Oshomah told podcast, Projectified®.
Don’t make decisions in isolation.
When it’s time to make a big decision or figure out how to overcome an obstacle, Oshomah recommends turning to your team.
“If you make decisions with the input of your team, it will help them in buying into it and giving you support,” he said. “Communicate to them very clearly what the challenges are, and seek their opinion so that it can help you make an informed decision.”
Look outside of your circle.
Before embarking on a new project, Oshomah recommends that project professionals look for insights from outside resources, including lessons learned from past projects and risk registers.
“Once you have these two documentations, it will help you to know what not to do and how not to get into the risk and challenges that were encountered in similar projects,” he said.
Rely on data.
According to Ramyajit Dasgupta, global analytics manager at Concentrix, a customer experience solutions company, in Kolkata, India, data can help take the guesswork out of the decision-making process.
“Data can also provide me with the value of helping project managers, and other managers as well, to schedule the work, allocate the resources,” she told Projectified®. “It can be used for further requirement of the projects, or in various milestones of the phases.”
To leverage that data, Dasgupta recommends relying on business intelligence and analytics.
“The business intelligence is considered to be the descriptive form of data these days, and in terms of analytics and in order to focus on the past and the present data to glean insights into what has happened or what is currently happening to particular processes,” she said. “So, business intelligence gives project managers and project management officers access to the real-time matrices to support better and faster decision-making and to achieve increased visibility into projects, process and their outcomes.”
To hear more from these project professionals and learn how they use data in their decision-making, listen to Pro Tips for Data-Driven Decision Making.
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