Quantellia Publications

By bringing engineering discipline to the boardroom, telcos can leverage underutilized data sources to support decisions more rigorously and achieve better alignment during decision implementation throughout an organization.

Of all the responsibilities borne by managers in today’s large organizations, the most important lie in the decisions they must make—decisions that must at once utilize resources most efficiently, find the right balance between opportunity and risk, and satisfy internal and external constraints, while meeting the often intangible needs of countless stakeholders. And they must achieve this in a world whose complexity would have been unimaginable by their forbearers. Despite the recognized enormity of what is at stake, and the ready availability of sophisticated decision support tools, most decisions affecting human livelihoods (and often lives) are ultimately made without a structured process, or any critical review or quality assurance. All too familiar are resulting outcomes that range from less than optimal, to truly disastrous on a global scale.

As a society, we can no longer afford the costs associated with the way important, complex decisions have traditionally been made. Fortunately, history shows us the way to a solution. In the past, as the sophistication of technologies increased, many disciplines reached a stage where the complexity of the artifacts they could construct exceeded the capabilities of the management techniques then being used. For example, many early steel structures collapsed before the “master builder’s” craft was replaced by the professional discipline of the structural engineer, and most major software projects failed until “programming” evolved into “software engineering”.

This pattern suggests that “naked” technologies (like software programming, and steel girder construction) are not fully effective until they are surrounded by what we have come to call an engineering methodology. Principles of Decision Engineering shows that this holds true for decision making in large, complex, organizations. Key to the process is a visual language for decision making that unifies the quantitative experts and the managers, the senior executives and the employees that must bring the decision to reality, and the many stakeholders in every decision made by an organization. Containing hundreds of classic mistakes and practical recommendations, Principles of Decision Engineering shows that a very simple set of best practices can unwind the complexity faced by modern managers and allow them—along with their teams—to steer effectively towards the complex problem of both lowering costs while raising revenues as well as maintaining intangible factors like employee morale and brand reputation.