Decision making is one of the most important tasks the project manager has to deal with.  Everyone would agree that these decisions have an impact on the project, but it is sometimes overlooked that how the decision is made is also important.

What should the project manager do?  Do a quick analysis and act fast to keep the momentum of the team or do a thorough analysis of the problem to make sure the right decision is made?  As usual, there is no universal answer that works in all situations.  But there are some guidelines you can follow.

First of all, the project manager has to understand that not all decisions are created equal.  And what makes the difference between them?  Their consequences.

Imagine you are managing an SW project and you have to decide:

• The color scheme used in the interface.
• The programming language and framework you are going to use.

How can these decisions affect the project?  Even if you choose a horrible color scheme and have to change it in the future, the impact should be minimum.  A few hours?  A day?  But what about the programming language?  A wrong selection may make the project be late, over budget, below the quality standard or all of them!  So it looks that it wouldn’t be smart to use the same decision making process in all situations…

My recommendation is to adapt the time we spend to make the decision to the possible consequences the decision has.  If we take the two extremes:

Unimportant decisions:  don’t spend time on them.  Make a quick decision based on the information you have and forget about it.  You have to move on so that you can free your mind to focus on more important things.

Key decisions:  if you know that your choice can have a significant effect on the project, analyze it thoroughly.  It is better to stop and spend a few days gathering all the information you need.  The time you use for this analysis will reduce the risk to make the wrong decision, and you will (most of the times) avoid working in one direction to later find out that you have to start from the beginning.

Of course nothing is back or white, there are lots of greys in between.  It is sometimes hard to know what the possible effect of our choice is.  However, it is usually easy to know when we are dealing with an unimportant issue.  If you find yourself in that situation, don’t waste any more time!

And a last piece of advice.  No matter how bad the outcome of a decision is, don’t waste any time thinking that you should have done something else, or trying to justify why you made that decision, or blaming someone else.  All these actions won’t improve your situation.  Just learn from the experience and move on.

Working as a Project Manager, it is highly probable that one of your project fails sooner or later.  There are always risks that you will try to minimize, external factors that you will not be able to control, or you may just make a bad decision.

I don’t want to be pessimistic.  I just want you to accept that failure is an option, and it may happen to you.  All great leaders and entrepreneurs have suffered failure or rejection.  But what makes a leader a great leader is what they do after failure.  You can deny it and try to fool yourself so that you feel better.  You can blame someone else and don’t accept any responsibility.  Or you can learn from the experience, move on and start your next challenge with more energy and being a better professional.

I heard once:  “It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, but how many times you rise up”.  An example of this is Steve Jobs.  If you haven’t seen his commencement address at Stanford, I highly recommend it.

And you have to remember that being a Project Manager you are also a leader, which means that rising up will not only benefit you but the whole project team.