Management Excellence Toolkit-Part 4: Improve Your Estimating and Forecasting Effectiveness March 16, 2011 by Art Petty Leave a Comment 27 Note from Art: Your decisions define you as a leader and a manager, yet we spend very little time in our busy lives finding ways to improve our abilities in this area. This Management Excellence Toolkit Series will help you recognize the challenges and pitfalls of individual and group decision-making and offer ideas on improving performance for you and your co-workers. Part 1 of this series emphasized the importance of developing, updating and referencing a Decision Journal. Part 2, focused on understanding how we make decisions and how various traps and biases often derail us. In Part 3, we …show more content…
The cost, time-to-market (or implementation) implications are huge! Alternatively, I’ve observed over-zealous executive teams declare a time-to-market mandate without consideration of the project complexities. The pressure on the project teams results in estimates executives “want to hear,” but that have no basis in the reality of the work. As time and cost estimates are missed, the environment tends to deteriorate into one of finger-pointing, excuse-making and general dysfunction Fear Impacts Estimates: While fear pushes project estimates out into the future, this same environment likely results in ultra-conservative sales forecasts on one hand and unrealistic cost estimates on the other. For anyone accountable for revenue and/or expense numbers, you tend to take your cue on these numbers from environmental pressures. I’ve observed managers who felt pressure to inflate revenue forecasts out of fear of being viewed as naysayers and poor team players, while at the same time, deflate expense numbers out of fear of being viewed as not having control over costs. Fear in the workplace creates estimating and forecasting gamesmanship. Prior Performance May Be a Poor Predictor: Much like the recency effect displayed by the Everest expedition leaders, we open additional trap doors for our estimating and forecasting approaches by relying too much on prior performance in spite of changing conditions. The past is
1. Planning Risks: Inadequate time to plan, allocate resources and scheduling thoroughly for projects completions and budget parameters.
Managers within organizations are faced with the challenges daily of making excellent decisions. In everyday life we are challenged in making sound decision, decision that will last for a life time. Folk often wonder after making a decision if it was the right choice, will it affect the people around me, was this a good choice for my family, and will the decision affect them. In order to be an effective manager you have to possess the skill of outstanding decision making skills. In order for one to be successful within their personal life they may also need to possess an understanding of effective decision making. The decision- making process should be one that makes a positive change. Can the decision making process work
Decision-making in the workforce is a process of responsibilities used by upper management to implement, enforce rules, regulations, and maintain a successful environment. Decision-making implemented more effectively by making a plan, thinking it through, accepting more than one opinion and determining what is best. However, decision-making often utilized more effectively by opening doors of opportunities for a suggestion, question, discussion, and feedback. Although, more involvement helps improve understanding, utilize behavior skills and present opportunities for better communication. Everyday life consists of decision-making, the right decision may not always be applied, but ensure room for improvement and opportunity. Individuals approached decision-making in many different ways. As stated by (Jones, Graham, & Bateman, 2006) decision making is a procedure used to recognize a problem, weigh the alternatives and evaluate a solution in which, certain situations will require different approaches to become effective.
To close the gap between actual and desired performance, decisions need to be made. Decision making involves making a selection from among alternative courses of action. Implementation and evaluation of the implementation provide feedback into the next cycle of group decision making.
Three factors define the success of any project; these are time, cost, and quality (Wysocki and RK 2013: 4). This paper identifies three main facets of project management that were inappropriately implemented, namely; Resourcing, Stakeholder Management, and Risk Management and how their improper implementation led to the violation of the three constraints (i.e. time, cost, and quality).
During project planning, if you have inaccurate and low estimations this will obviously put you over budget. Some Pollyannaish PMs tend to write exaggeratedly enthusiastic estimates. The PM must rely on documenting and qualifying their figures and believe in the importance of pertinent historical data.
• Pressures to overstate revenues in order to report achieving announced revenue or profitability targets or industry norms that were not achieved in reality owing to such factors as global, national, or regional economic conditions, the impact of technological developments on the entity 's
Thinking critically and making decisions are important parts of today’s business environment. It is important to understand how the decision making process works and the steps involved. The nine steps of the decision making process are: identifying the problem, defining criteria, setting goals and objectives, evaluating the effect of the problem, identifying the causes of the problem, framing alternatives, evaluating impacts of the alternatives, making the decision, implementing the decision, and measuring the impacts. (Decision, 2007.) By using various methods and tools to assist in making important business decisions an individual can ensure the decisions they make will be as successful as possible. In this paper it
It is harder to budget revenues because it requires a guess about what customers will respond, in what volume and at what prices. Expenses are generally known. You know what you are going to hire, at what rates and for what hours. You know the rent on the lease signed. There are some surprises in expenses but not nearly the level for
Many times when faced with a hard decision to make or one that involves many different factors or consequences the executive tends to look for “an educated guess” or “take a calculated risk” but no real calculation is done nor any education is obtained to deal with uncertainty concerning the decision.
The focus of my term paper is the decision making process used by today's top-level managers. Top-level managers, such as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Operations Officers (COOs), and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), must make critical decisions on a daily basis. Their choices and the resulting outcomes affect the company, the employees, and the stakeholders. Due to the high importance of their decisions, the process they use to reach them merits a close examination.
When people argue with decision analysis and its achievements they usually mention the story of DuPont, an American chemical company. It managed to successfully integrate risk and decision analysis functions to both operational and strategic levels. The company claimed that Desciison and Risk Analysis not only brought tangible benefits to the company, but also intangible, such as increased attention and commitment to actions (Krumm et Roll, 1992).
Business forecasting is the process of studying historical performance for the purpose of using the information gained to project future business conditions so that decisions can be made today that will assist in the achievement of certain goals. Forecasting involves taking historical date and using it to project future data with a mathematical model. Forecasts are extensively used to support business decisions and direct the work of operations managers. In this paper I will introduce different types of forecasting techniques.
* Many IT professionals think that preparing cost estimates is a job for accountants when in fact, it is a very demanding and important skill that project managers need
As individuals, we make decisions throughout the day weighing the cause and effect, cost and benefit, risk and impact of our actions on ourselves and upon others. When taken to a larger scale, as the manager of a team, the CEO of a corporation, or the leader of a nation, the decisions exponentially increase in impact and importance.