KM Talk: Improving decision making in projects (and in life)

Project managers often have to make important decisions based on scant or ambiguous information. The question thus arises as to how one can make good decisions in such situations. One way is to harness the collective knowledge of a project team in a way that helps develop a shared perspective on the decision problem. This talk introduces Dialogue Mapping, a technique that facilitates such a shared understanding.

Dialogue Mapping will be demonstrated via a case-study of its use in an enterprise IT project. The utility of the technique in capturing organizational knowledge will also be discussed. Finally, the wider applicability of Dialogue Mapping will be illustrated via a light-hearted example from real life.

About  the Presenter

Kailash Awati works at a pharmaceutical multinational where he is Director of an IT Service Center within the organisation. Over the last several years he has worked variously as a regional IT manager, business consultant, project manager, database geek and engineering software developer, in organisations ranging from startups to multinationals.

Kailash is co-author of The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices (http://hereticsguidebooks.com), an award-winning book on collaborative approaches to managing complex problems in organisations. His professional interests include enterprise IT (with a focus on architecture, data management and business intelligence), project / program management, knowledge management, risk analysis and collaborative decision-making. In his free time, he maintains a critically acclaimed blog (http://eight2late.wordpress.com) where he writes about these and related topics.