A CASE-STUDY OF STRATEGIC ENGINEERING DECISION-MAKING USING JUDGMENTAL MODELING AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILING

This paper focuses on the role that judgmental modeling played in help ing a large international engineering company plan its future producti on environment and also on how psychological profiling can help us to understand how different individuals within the decision-making team c ontribute to the overall decision. In this case study, two strategic d ecisions had to be made: which production process to use and which pro jects to allocate to the identified process. The decisions were compli cated by the fact that different members of the management team were r esponsible 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 judgmen tal modeling was found to have advantages in terms of structuring the decision process and in rank-ordering the potential outcomes. A compar ison is made of the rank orders of the different potential outcomes be fore and after the use of judgmental modeling, and the psychological p rofiles of the individuals are used to provide further insights into h ow decision makers change their points of view over the life of the de cision.