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Project success depends on the effectiveness of all project decisions, not just the few made formally via structured methods. This course applies a variety of insights from diverse fields including psychology, cognitive science, naturalistic decision making, action science, sense making, mathematics, and communication theory to improve engineering decision-making.

Learnings and insights from the course are used to develop a strategy for improving decision-making and to develop answers to four questions of key importance in project design:

• Why do so many changes occur late in projects?
• Why do we have so many problems at interfaces?
• Why do we repeat mistakes from project to project?
• Why do projects usually finish late?

Topics Include:

• Collecting and evaluating data to generate conclusions/beliefs
• How we use preconceived notions to make sense of new data
• A structured focus of our values to improve our skill at setting objectives and identifying alternatives
• The cause of defensiveness
• Individual and organizational learning—why the most important lessons are often the most difficult to learn
• Naturalistic decision-making; the study of the impacts of stress and expertise
• Decision theory insights to improve the performance of teams and minimize problems at interfaces between teams
• The book, Making Sense and Making Decisions: An Engineer’s Guide to Project Decision Making, an engineer’s guide to project decision making, authored by the instructor is the handout used for this course.