Proposal on Behavioral Decision-Making in Project Management
Chapter One
OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
The will investigate the following objectives
- To investigate the relationship between behavioral decision-making and project management constraints
- To investigate the relationship between behavioral decision-making and project management failure
- To investigate the relationship between behavioral decision-making and project management skills
- To ascertain the relationship between behavioral decision-making and project management effectiveness
Chapter Two
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
Project management
Project management is a distinct area of management that helps in handling projects. It has three key features to distinguish it from other forms of management and they include a project manager, the project team, and the project management system. The project management system comprises organization structure, information processing and decision making, and the procedures that facilitate the integration of horizontal and vertical elements of the project organization. The project management system focuses on integrated planning and control.
Benefits of the Project Management Approach
The rationale for following the project management approach is as follows.
- A project management approach will help in handling complex, costly, and risky assignments by providing an interdisciplinary approach in handling the assignments. Example: R&D organizations.
- Project management approaches help in handling assignments in a specified time frame with definite start and completion points. For example, handling customer orders by Industries involved in the production of capital goods.
- Project management approaches provide task orientation to personnel in an Organization in handling assignments. Example: Organizations in the IT sector handling software development assignments for clients.
Decision-making
The topic of decision-making is familiar to all because by taking them we keep ourselves active. As Finkelstein’s (2009: 1) quote summarizes it: “Decision-making lies at the heart of our personal and professional lives”. It might be today’s lunch or the education we choose to pursue, nonetheless, choices are made constantly. Its significance to businesses is undeniable because a business that cannot make decisions effectively and act upon them will lose ground (Rogers et al., 2014: 54). Also organizations executing critical decisions efficiently outperform those who implement brilliant decisions slowly (Rogers et al., 2006: 54). This is why businesses can benefit tremendously from decisiveness and action resulting from it. As a science decision-making has been explored in Economics and Management literature already for some time, of which Decision Theory is evident proof (Gänswein, 2011: V). It has also been studied in mathematics, sociology, psychology, economics, and political sciences, each providing a different perspective to it. Decision-making in a business environment is a separate topic in itself because decisions made in a business context are meant to keep the business up and running, grow, and profit. As this thesis’ research focuses on operations in a business context, the literature review has focused on management theories discovering best practice models creating a foundation for a starting point for this research.
Decision-Making in Project Management
Everything that we do as human beings has to do with decision-making. Whether it is deciding on where to eat dinner, where to live, what type of job to take on, or the kind of people to be associated with.
So it should probably be pretty simple to figure out that within Project Management, decision-making plays a key role in determining the success or failure of the effort.
CHAPTER THREE
RESEARCH METHODS
This chapter examines the various methods and procedures that will be adopted in carrying out this study. These include the following: design of the Study, area of the study population of the Study, sample and sampling techniques, instrumentation, validation of the instrument, reliability of the instrument, method of data collection, method of data analysis and decision rule.
METHOD OF DATA ANALYSIS
Correlation coefficient will be used in answering research questions while all hypothesis will be tested using Pearson Product Moment Correlation Analysis (PPMC) will be used in testing the hypotheses. All hypotheses will be tested at 0.05 significant levels
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