Opportunities for Decision Analysis in Engineering Management

Abstract

The engineering management (EM) decision-making (DM) environment in modern organizations is becoming increasingly complex. This is partly due to the technical complexity of systems being developed and the managerial complexity of orchestrating the decisions made by multidisciplinary teams, usually with conflicting goals and objectives. Systematic approaches, such as decision and risk analysis (DRA), can play a significant role in improving EM DM methods by providing efficient, effective, repeatable, and communicative DM processes, procedures, and guidelines. In this paper, we propose the use of the DRA paradigm to provide a standard and repeatable methodology for EM DM environments. We introduce and explore the four phases of the proposed DM process and discuss barriers to its use. © 1973-2011 IEEE.