Decisions, Decisions….
The topic of my blog is Decisions. We make thousands of personal and work related decisions every day. Most of our daily decisions are small in scope like “what am I going to eat for breakfast?” or “what am I going to wear?”… some are more important like deciding how to prioritize tasks at work and some are monumental in their importance (e.g. who we decide to marry) and the consequences of these decisions determine the course of a life. 
No one makes good decisions all the time. In fact, it’s possible to make a good decision and have it result in a bad outcome. Or conversely, to make a bad choice that ends up with a good result. This blog will try to help us understand why we make the decisions we do – both good and bad. This blog will examine what the characteristics of good decisions are as well as the cognitive processes we go through when making decisions, how emotions play into the process, our conscious and unconscious influences and pretty much anything related to making choices.
In the PLM space decisions of varying impact are made throughout the product lifecycle. These decisions include portfolio level decisions, make – buy decisions, supplier selection, and thousands of other decisions that are made every day in order to support PLM. Developing a new product like an automobile involves many thousands of decisions, most of which are inter-related. In addition, the decisions made at the beginning of the lifecycle often determine or constrain the downstream decisions. I’ll discuss what is needed to make good PLM decisions and the Decision Support Tools available to Siemens PLM customers.
As you can probably tell from this introduction, my blog will discuss both PLM and personal decision making. The principles are often the same, including the influence of our emotions and prejudices. I will also review the latest literature on decision making, dabble in a bit of psychology, examine current events for decision making examples and range freely about the decision making domain.
