Decision Making, Value Propositioning, and Project Failures - Reality and Responsibility

This paper outlines reasons for project failures and ties them to value proposition failures. It defines a value proposition as including both the proposed project deliverable values as well as the implementation processes that will assure value is delivered. It shows that an effective value proposition is not so much about the technology being proposed as it is about the problem and value perceptions of the Decision Makers who will sponsor a project; and that it is the project Champion's responsibility to learn the perceptions of decisions makers, and to carefully guide their education of problem issues and solution values...continuously. To this end the bulk of this paper presents two models of how Decision Makers form perceptions from value propositions. One model represents the psychological behavior of individuals as Decision Makers, and the other of group decision making behavior. Both draw from Nobel Prize winning research and show how misperception is the general rule, illuminating the issues that the Champion must address.