Building Decisions: The Power of Choosing by Advantages for Project Success

This book presents a framework and practical guidelines for everyday decision-making. The authors introduce the reader to a specific decision-making system, Choosing by Advantages (CBA).

PazArroyo earned her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, where she was introduced to Choosing by Advantages (CBA) by her professors, Glenn Ballard, and Iris Tommelein. She has published dozens of scientific papers proving CBA benefits and making this method well-known globally in the lean construction community. She has consulted and taught CBA in Chile, Mexico, India, the USA, Canada, Ireland, Norway, and more. Paz also developed a popular Coursera massive open online class that teaches CBA, among other project management methods; this class has reached 291,506 students since 2016. Paz also has over 28,800 reads on her articles in ResearchGate.

AnnettSchöttle earned her Ph.D. at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) on requirements and incentives to create a collaborative Lean project delivery system for capital projects based on the self-determination theory. For her thesis, she was a research associate at Capital Programs at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF) and, in parallel, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. After returning to Germany, Annett started working as a Lean consultant. She helps different project teams in the design and construction phases to make processes transparent for improvement and to create alignment. Her passion is transforming the construction industry and improving teams to deliver successful projects. She regularly lectures at international universities and co-founded CollabDecisions, a platform to share knowledge on how to make decisions collaboratively.

RandiChristensen is an engineer by background and earned her PhD at Aalborg University in Denmark, focusing on how we learn from project to project. The Ph.D. was action-based and included working on site, where she found that transparent processes enable people with different backgrounds to contribute to planning and decision-making. She has been employed as an external lecturer, supervisor for Master Students and PhD, and as an external censor by Aalborg University. As Sustainability Director at COWI, an international engineering consultancy, she keeps focusing on decision-making as this is the key point where we can drive the projects in a more sustainable direction by including multiple voices and pools of knowledge.