Decision-Making Models Essay

A project has been estimated to take six weeks and cost $130,000. Cost and percent complete data are provided in the table below through 3 weeks of the project. % scheduled data can be obtained from the Gantt chart following the table.

There are several factors that influence one to make decision. These factors are: personal perception and preference, experience and knowledge, competence, and self-concept (Kelly & Crawford, 2013, p. 354). This paper will record a critical analysis of scenario 1 “Workload Worries” by using the five step decision making process outlined in Kelly and Crawford (2013). The five steps are: identify the need for a decision; determine the goal or outcome; identify the alternatives or

Initial projections show that the current schedule will take 50 weeks to finish with a final budget estimate of $3.152 million. Although the project estimate comes in under budget, the time frame for completion extends beyond the acceptable 45

Decisions! Decisions! Decisions! How do you make decisions? Have you ever asked yourself, “How did I make that decision?” Whether big or small, important or not so important, decision making is a process. Some people way the pros and cons while others may just flip a coin. Are decisions based on feelings, outcomes or information? Often times if we just go with our gut feeling will be miss out on important information that should be included in our decision.

1. What is the estimated project completion date? (Assume there are no holidays and ignore the sunk cost of the planning team’s effort)

Decision making is defined as "the cognitive process leading to the selection of a course of action among alternatives" (Decision Making, 2006, para. 1). Decisions are made continually throughout our day.

Organizational behavior helps managers to improve the organization in a good way. Decision making process is the one of the behavior in human organizational behavior. According to McShane and Von Glinow (2000), “decision making a conscious process of making choices among one or more alternatives with the intention of moving toward some desired state of affairs”. Decision making is a linear process and it includes six steps such as identifying the problems, gather and evaluate data, list and evaluate alternatives, select best action, implement the decision and getter feedback (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix 1).

We have to think about the qualitative factors that are involved in our decision making too. In the decision making process, as we saw in a case called The Nancy M. Hohman, we saw that many times the numbers will not speak louder than our personal preferences. The Nancy M. Hohman was a less than one year old ship, worthy US$ 40 million, carrying 200,000 tons of crude oil and 28 crew members and had an engine malfunction 9 miles way off the coast of South Africa. However, Port Elizabeth (the nearest one) was too small for the ship and the next close one was 380 miles away.

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.

Other assumptions that we made for the case study were that we could only use the 7.5-hour workday and one line of production.  We also assumed that we were limited to the range of 8 to 12 people stated in the problem. Because we are making complex equipment, we assumed that we could not change the order of the operations themselves but that we could have a station do varying combinations of operations. The projections in the Excel spreadsheet also assume that the engineers’ specified times would be accurate once production begins.  Regarding the hardware testing operations, the activities are to be performed on three computers concurrently, so we divided the operation times by three to arrive at the true operation times.

Initial projections show that the current schedule will take 50 weeks to finish with a final budget estimate of $3.152 million. Although the project estimate comes in under budget, the time frame for completion extends beyond the acceptable 45

* Sample: The sample is limited to a small proportion of working professionals in Western Sydney and may not accurately reflect the population of working professionals.

The PERT method requires three estimates of time; optimistic, most likely and pessimistic. This method assumes that actual project times are distributed according to the beta probability distribution. Most time estimates often exceed the best estimate or the most likely estimate because managers like to be optimistic with their time estimates.

The importance of decision making in individual daily life and in organization level was demonstrated by two scientists, Arkes and Hammond (1992), in ‘Judgment and Decision making’ indentified the four types of information which decision maker requires constructing a decision tree.

How reliable is this 5 days estimate? It will depend on the engineer, and whether this task has been done before or not? If it is a routine task, and has been performed many times, a single point estimate may be ok…