7 Steps In Decision Making Process

Decision Making Process

Project management is an art where you need skills to manage, control, track, and efficiently monitor the projects and effectively to make the products or services to successful completion. In day-to-day life, we will face many challenging situations that we may be asked to fulfill certain objectives by taking decisions. The situations will be filled with certain choices and alternatives that we need to select in our personal and professional life. We need to make the best solutions to solve our problems. We may make the best possible decisions in the challenging situations that are nothing but part of the project management strategy. The decisions that we make must not be based on assumptions but on the data-driven approach. This is nothing but informed decision making. The Process of Decision Making is not that easy, you need to cover all the 7 steps provided below to make a successful decision. The seven steps in the decision-making process are represented by the diagram.

While making decisions we must do some analysis on the data that we have for any situations and probably may need some data analysis tools to make data-driven decisions. We must make the decisions at right time and in the right situations. We must neither procrastinate on decision making nor take decisions in haste. Decision making is a skill that is an art as well as habit making process. In this article, we will discuss the 7 steps of the decision-making process. What Is the Decision-Making Process? The business decision-making process is the step-by-step process of evaluating the situations or problems at hand doing some analysis on the data and choosing the best possible solutions or path.

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What Are the 7 Steps of Decision Making?

The 7 Steps in Decision Making Processes are as follows,

Step 1: Need for identification - The first step is to identify what problem we have, what are the objectives, what questions we need to answer etc. This is done by analyzing briefly what is the situation and how to solve that challenging problem at hand. Once you identify the problem statement, define in detail the problem or the situation in hand. Defining is one important process of identification of the problem. Deep dive into the problem to find the answers. Make the situation, or questions or the problems measurable so that you can go to the root of the situations to find the answer. The PMP Training by StarAgile covers the 7 steps of the decision making process as per PMP as part of the syllabus. Take up the PMP training by StarAgile if you aspire to be a certified project manager.

Step 2: Collecting relevant details - The second step in the decision-making process is to collect the relevant and pertinent information on the problem or situation or the questions. You need to attack the problems by collecting the necessary facts about what are the parameters that make the situation or problem or questions and then try to answer them. Do some internal assessment and on what has caused the failure in the past, what are the success factors also do some market research or do some studies or evaluation. You may need an expert consultant on these issues that is fine. Deep dive into this does not collect more than the required information that will make you bogged down.

Step 3: Finding the alternatives - You may get several answers when solving the problems; you also get several alternatives for decision making. Finding options or alternatives is an important step in the decision-making process. Sometimes you will get a combination of 2 or more alternatives to solve the problem, which is fine. I suppose you get more than 2 alternatives by measurement and data-driven approach to choosing the best alternative. You may get an alternative based on facts and figures that you must recommend to solve any business problems. Alternatives and choices are always there for finding answers, choose the one which is more relevant and suits you needs to fulfill the objectives.

Step 4: Weighing the pieces of evidence - As you have seen in the previous steps that you have relevant information and more than 2 alternatives. So now you need to select the best possible one by weighing them properly. You can weigh the alternatives on the 2 categories, what can contribute a failure and what actions will decide the success factors. You may put some simple mathematics to put weight on each of the success and failure factors and then weigh the pieces of evidence to make a decision. You also want some kind of decision-making tools.

Step 5: Choosing the right option from the alternatives - Once you have weighed the options and alternatives in solving the problem or getting answers the next step is to make an important decision on the options or alternatives. At this stage you have identified the problem, have relevant information, found the alternatives or the options, and carefully weighed them, now you are ready to choose the best option or the best alternatives. This is where the decision-making process comes into the picture. StarAgile provides the Project Management Professional training course online that can be taken at the convenience of home or office.

Step 6: Taking relevant action - Once you have decided on the possible answers or options or alternatives and you have chosen the best possible options by deciding. Now you need to take the action on the options that you have chosen. Make a plan that is tangible and achievable in project management. Develop a project plan and let the team work on it, also know the importance of project planning before you start.

Step7: Review your decision and track the progress - Once you have set the ball rolling and action is going on, you need to track, control, manage and monitor the progress made at each stage of the project life cycle. Is your decision correct and appropriate are you going towards the results that you wanted from the project? Is the team working on the action correctly? This needs to be answered and you need to continuously steer the project in the right direction. If the decision you took was wrong identify the failure factors and repeat the decision-making process. Make informed decisions by completing the Project Manager Certificate Online conducted by StarAgile institute.

There are tools available for the decision-making process such as decision tree, decision matrix, and creating pros and cons lists. These tools help you to make an informed decision on the data.

Conclusion 

In this article, we have seen the decision-making process steps to make data-driven informed decisions. The decision making is an important responsibility of the project manager. To become a project manager you need to understand, learn, and take up the PMP certification online with StarAgile. The PMP is the project manager certification provided by the Project Management Institute (PMI). StarAgile is the training partner of PMI to provide training on the PMP course. To know more about this subject register for the PMP training online with StarAgile and start your project management journey. 

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