Making essential choices with scant information: front-end decision-making in major projects

The choice of a concept on major projects is often decided early. This is the key decision of the project: more important to long-term success than implementation. But this decision is made when uncertainty is highest. This book describes how to study strategic needs and align the project’s objectives and the anticipated effect of alternative concepts. It discusses the use of qualitative assessments when information is limited. It describes the issues about evaluating judgmental information, and discusses how scant information can help establish a broad overall perspective. Accurate information rapidly becomes outdated, while carefully extracted qualitative information about a project concept can provide reliable decision-input. Techniques are discussed for making quantitative decisions. Finally, the impact on real-world project decisions is considered