The Different Levels of Decision Intelligence

Prof. Gaetan Libert / Jun 5, 2020

For a decision to be useful to a company, it is important that everyone knows exactly who should make the decision. Each employee has a fragmented view of the company. They have the potential to envision goals that are effective for their job, but not for other roles within the enterprise.

Each employee has a unique role and the decision-making authority associated with the role. If a decision goes beyond their role, it is imperative to appeal to the next level of decision making. The success of a business depends on the quality of individual decisions and the interaction between the various levels of decision-making. It is therefore essential to clearly define what data is available at each level and how the data is transmitted from one level to the next.

Level 1 is corporate strategy. The data that is considered when planning a strategy depends on the mode of operation (growth, stagnation, slowdown). This includes personnel costs, additional costs and the cost of potential future projects. The objective is to make the best use of these costs by adding a target profit for the chosen period of reflection. The type and number of projects to be implemented in the chosen period, their target durations, the resources required and their load curves in full-time equivalents and finally the expected gain are deducted.

Level 2 inherits the necessary information for global planning including start dates, end dates, project tasks and individualized resources from level 1. A planning per project is therefore deduced. The project schedules are then compared to check their feasibility. If they aren’t, the start dates are modified (drag and drop the project schedules) to obtain optimal results.

Using the guidelines provided by level 2, Level 3 then develops a detailed planning of project tasks, including start, end, load, human and material resources, according to the granularity of the operating sequences required, whether monthly, weekly, daily or hourly.

At level 4, the constructed planning is confronted with its realisation and an execution control is carried out. This is done without any further detail of the tasks, but with the possibility of rescheduling over a very short time scale, in order to cope with the imponderable events of real time.

If this re-planning proves unsatisfactory, adaptations will involve level 3, level 2 or level 1 modifications depending on the importance of the adaptations. Planning is thus a constant back and forth between levels of decision making.