– See All Project Management Key Concepts –
Voting
What is voting? You’ll come across this in your project management career when we’re gathering requirements, and in other project process group areas as well. Voting is a very common way to get to a decision when a decision is need needed to be made. The way it’s described in the PMBOK guide is a “collective decision-making technique”. It’s an assessment process where we’re able to assess a few different options and see which option we actually want to move forward with.
When we have multiple alternatives, those are our options, with an expected outcome in the form of future actions. In other words, what are we going to do in the future? If we can’t all agree (and sometimes that’s totally fine) but there are other ways that we can move forward, and that’s what we use voting for.
These techniques can be used to generate, classify and prioritize your product requirements in the early days as you’re gathering these requirements for your product and your project. There are a few voting techniques that you’ll come across and that you’ll see in the PMP exam and the CAPM exam.
We’ve got unanimity, where where everybody agrees – so you’ve got the a hundred percent of people and everyone is happy, everyone agrees that they’re going forward. You have unanimity, they’re unanimous.
But you may not have that in your case, so the next step down from that is where we have the majority of people. This is where a decision is reached where and more than 50% of the members of the group agree. Instead of a hundred percent now we have more than fifty percent, and we’re able to move forward because that is the majority of people.
Now even then if you’ve got a large group of people, or maybe there’s a lot of different decisions to be made, you may not have the majority. So the last one is plurality.
Plurality is a decision that’s reached where the largest block in your group decides. Maybe you have 30% of the people agreeing for that particular decision and then all of the others are 20%, 10%, 5%, another 20% and whatever else it takes to make up the hundred percent. But none of those are a large enough block to get to that thirty percent, which is the largest block. And that’s the one that you’re able to move forward with.
There is a variation of voting. Voting is used throughout many different projects life cycles including the agile, iterative or incremental life cycles. One variation that they use is the fist of five.
The Fist of Five
The fist of five is where the project manager simply asks the team to show their level of support for a decision (i.e. your future actions, what are we going to be doing) and holding up a closed fist which would be no support, or five fingers which would be full support for a particular decision, or any fingers in between. The power of doing it this way is that if a team member holds up fewer than three fingers, then that team member is given the opportunity to discuss their objections with the team, and that gives them a voice. Maybe they advise of some risks or some ideas that other people have not thought of, that we need to consider as a team. The project manager can continue that until the team achieves a consensus or they agree to move on to the next decision, because maybe they haven’t agreed. They have achieved a majority for example or a plurality.
And that is the idea of voting in your project.
– David McLachlan