CORPORATE SERVICES > PROJECT DECISION JUMP-START
PPI PROJECT DECISION JUMP-START SERVICES
Project Decision
Jump-Start Services
Visualize your stakeholders’ decisions and use them to validate the requirements for your project. Clarify the scope of your design responsibilities and create a proactive plan for design decision-making.
Why would you want to take advantage of PPI’S Project Decision Jump-Start?
Your stakeholders, both external customers and internal partners, have made numerous decisions that bound the scope for your project. But those decisions are not explicitly stated, explained, or traced to the initial set of project requirements. What do you do to ensure their decisions and the originating requirements are aligned?
- Choose the Requirements Validation (RV) Jump-Start Service option.
You have a solid set of requirements that have been validated with your customers – how do you plan the solution design effort for maximum speed, decision quality, and stakeholder value delivery?
- Choose the Project Decision Planning (PDP) Jump-Start Service option.
Even better, bundle the two options for maximum positive impact on your requirements analysis and solution design.
Decision Pattern Engagements
Founded on PPI’s unique capabilities
Both the RV and PDP services are built around PPI’s unique capability to explicitly model the decisions implied by stakeholder source documents. We map these sources to a set of proven decision patterns for enterprise strategy, product/system design, process capability design and/or service design. After your stakeholder decisions are made visible, they can be validated and used as the source of derived requirements which may or may not align with the stakeholder needs and requirements that you received.
This approach is a powerful generator of highly focused requirement issues that guide further requirements analysis and validation efforts. The same decision model makes visible the hand-off of design responsibility from the stakeholders to your team, the “givens” vs. the “To-be-decideds”. The resulting project Decision Breakdown Structure (DBS) clarifies the design decisions that are in-scope for your project, creates a Decision Analysis (Trade Study) Plan and enables early resolution of alignment issues between project scope, schedule, and budget baselines.
PPI tasks common to both services
In both the RV and PDP Service, PPI will:
- Provide you with a suggested set of source documents that provide the context for the current project.
- Set up a repository for the source documents and the project decision model. The repository may be Excel or an extension to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tool.
- Import stakeholder source documents into the repository to enable precise traceability.
- Populate the repository with the decision patterns that are relevant to your project type and scope.
- Map source data elements to the decisions in our patterns, i.e., reverse engineer the decisions implied in these documents.
- Create an explicit trace from source data to each decision instance from the pattern.
- Meet virtually with stakeholders in a Decision Blitz session to refine and validate the decision model.
- Confirm decisions that have been “closed” by the stakeholders by capturing the stakeholders’ consensus definition of the “committed” alternative.
- At the end of the project, deliver to you the fully-populated decision repository in the format chosen, e.g., Excel or the selected MBSE tool. This task includes a half-day of data migration assistance and training in the use of the repository/database features that are unique to the decision jump-start service.
Requirements Validation (RV) service tasks
Specific to the RV Service, PPI will:
- Derive candidate requirements from the definition of each committed alternative (in each “closed” decision) by considering the consequences of the alternative’s structure, behavior, footprint, interfaces, and life cycle.
- Capture requirement issues for resolution with stakeholders. These may be candidate derived requirements that conflict with the originating requirements that you received or potentially missing requirements that may be added to the project requirements baseline after additional analysis and stakeholder concurrence.
Project Decision Planning (PDP) service tasks
Specific to the PDP Service, PPI will:
- Work with your team to identify and prioritize the open decisions to be made during the design phase of your project.
- Develop a data gathering and analysis plan for the high priority open decisions. Compile this effort into a Project Decision Analysis Plan (aka Trade Study Plan).
- Align the Decision Analysis Plan with the current Project Work Breakdown Structure (PWBS) and master schedule. Capture project scope issues for resolution with your stakeholders.
Your role as a customer
During the Project Decision Jump-Start Service engagement, you will:
- Provide PPI with access to stakeholder documentation as requested.
- Coordinate with stakeholders for their timely participation in the virtual Decision Blitz session.
- Participate in all direct interactions with stakeholders in resolution of open issues that have been identified.
The timing of performance of this service can be negotiated depending on the needs of the client and the availability of PPI consultants. Typical time from tasking to completion is two to four weeks. All information exchanged between the client and PPI is, of course, confidential, and can be subject to a formal Non-Disclosure Agreement if desired.
Learn more
To learn more about PPI’s Decision Pattern services and how they might apply to your business or project, inquire below:
Let's Talk
Discuss your needs with us.
Ready to dive in?
For a custom proposal on how PPI’s Decision Pattern services might jump-start your business or project, please complete a brief survey:
Decision Pattern Services – Project Scoping Survey
Please describe your project (or strategic initiative) by answering the following questions:
Extra resources
See background articles on the fundamental concepts behind these services in PPI SyEN’s monthly newsjournal:
