Ithuta JV

Source - Article by Bob Andrew

Summary:
Decision-making when there are multiple choices can be extremely difficult and can lead to great frustration. There are two types of decision-makers: maximisers, who only want the best and satisficers, who are prepared to accept the good, not necessarily the best.When these sort of decisions have to be made, the discipline of Value Management can be most useful.

Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice

relates the ideas of psychologist Herbert Simon from the 1950s to the psychological stress which faces most consumers today. He notes some important distinctions between, what Simon termed, maximisers and satisficers. A maximiser is like a perfectionist, someone who needs to be assured that their every purchase or decision was the best that could be made. The way a maximiser knows for certain is to consider all the alternatives they can imagine. This creates a psychologically daunting task, which can become even more daunting as the number of options increases. The alternative to maximising is to be a satisficer. A satisficer has criteria and standards, but a satisficer is not worried about the possibility that there might be something better that he has not had time to consider.

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Making choices is an integral part of project management. Part of the problem is that there are often just too many options to choose from; we get paralysed by too much choice. Even if it is in our interest to make a choice we tend to delay the decision if there are too many choices and no one option stands out above the others. But, usually the real problem lies in a conflict in us between making the best possible choice (maximising) or making a choice that’s good enough (satisficing). If the project manager tends to be a maximiser, he will feel somewhat dissatisfied when he makes a choice, thinking that he had made a mistake or perhaps had to give up some possible benefits that the other options might have provided. Further, with all the choices available, he could have had unrealistic expectations and when it doesn’t work in the way he expected it to he feels regret and remorse, thinking that it’s his fault: “if only I’d made a better choice”.

On the other hand, if the project manager was of a satisficing bent, he’ll assess as many options as he can in the time available and accept a good option, without continuing the assessment process. This project manager would tend to be happier after making the decision to accept a good option and stop looking for perfection. Unlike the maximiser Project Manager, he would be disinclined to ‘second guess himself’ and not have any remorse.

Often, irrespective of the decision-making attitude of the project manager, many clients or owners, who are paying for the project, tend to be what might be called ‘poor-man maximisers’: they want the best but at the lowest cost, having ‘champagne tastes but beer bottle budgets’. This type of attitude will put any project manager into a state of psychological trauma, with high levels of stress, regret and remorse after any decision is made.

Perhaps the answer to this common project management dilemma is to invoke a value management discipline to dispel any decision-making angst. Instead of considering cost, considering the ‘value’ of something (defined as function per unit cost), for example, the performance, reliability and life-cycle cost, focuses the mind and, because these parameters are measurable, comparison becomes a lot easier and less controversial. Value Management can serve as the bridge between maximising and satisficing.