Decisions, decisions…

Is there any arena more prone to risk and adverse consequences than that of decision making?

Let me provide some fodder.

In Chapter 9 of Tony DeMarco’s and Tim Lister’s excellent book – Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (3rd Edition) you can find an excellent example of an era defining bad decision. Namely the implementation of open plan offices. I commend this great book and all that it is in it to everyone. In very brief summary, reduced costs of office accommodation (however paltry) are easy to quantify and a sure fire bet in terms of their realisation. The impact of effectiveness loss (however severe) is difficult to measure and quantify. Difficult it may be, but not impossible. The consequence of this is the output and creativity of a couple or three generations of office workers has been blighted.

In her book “How, Emotions are Made”, Lisa Feldman Barrett, talks about the US Transport Security Administration’s $900M programme (since abandoned) to train US airport security staff to recognise suspicious passengers through the interpretation of facial micro-expressions. This was the so called Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) programme. This unproven approach, since utterly debunked by modern neuroscience, is snake oil.

Whatever your views on football (soccer) and the proposed formation of the European Super League, the scorched earth it left in its wake provided another masterclass is simply how not to do things. There are few investments that result in a head of state threatening to respond with a “legislative bomb”. This was one of them.

These three failed investments might seem unrelated and disparate but in fact, they all have a lot in common.

None of the projects or investments were “must do” – to greater or lesser extent they were discretionary. The money could have been spent elsewhere (and clearly should have been) but was not.

All three projects could have undertaken the necessary diligence and assurance to invalidate (or at least deter) the decisions that were made.

All three projects relied on bad data (or no data and bad assumptions).

Let me be clear on the following point. 20:20 hindsight plays no part when data that could have been sourced before committing to an investment in order to validate the assumptions upon which an investment relied was overlooked or actively forgone.

It is not appropriate to lay the blame for these abject failures solely at the doorstep of project managers and project management. Undoubtedly, an assurance role does sit with project leaders. However, a sufficiently bullish project sponsor with sufficient funds wont easily be deterred and nor will their egos.

“Are such decisions difficult to get right?” is the wrong question. Are catastrophically bad decisions frequently made that could be avoided? Absolutely.

If you do need some structure around improving your assessment and decision making around investments, you could do a lot worse that starting with HM Treasury’s “The Green Book”.

In the blog post here, I make the case that a little assurance goes a long way. That assurance isn’t likely to produce a corresponding benefit however if there are not adequate governance arrangements in place. And really, governance is what this blog post is all about.

ISO 37000 Governance of Organisations is a published standard for what comprises good organisational governance if you were looking for one.

And in conclusion, what actually is the best advice for achieving project success? Let’s start with not doing stupid things.

Barnaby Davies is a project and programme management professional. Omnivisto is a company with a bright vision for how portfolios and programmes can be tracked, managed and delivered.