A case study of strategic engineering decision making using judgmental modeling and psychological profiling

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role that judgmental modeling played in helping a large international engineering company plan its future production environment and also on how psychological profiling can help us to understand how different individuals within the decision-making team contribute to the overall decision. In this case study, two strategic decisions had to be made: which production process to use and which projects to allocate to the identified process. The decisions were complicated by the fact that different members of the management team were responsible for different elements of the decision. There was extensive interchange and negotiation between these various parties throughout the decision-making process, and for both decisions the use of judgmental modeling was found to have advantages in terms of structuring the decision process and in rank-ordering the potential outcomes. A comparison is made of the rank orders of the different potential outcomes before and after the use of judgmental modeling, and the psychological profiles of the individuals are used to provide further insights into how decision makers change their points of view over the life of the decision.