Planning under Pressure offers managers, planners, consultants and students a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the Strategic Choice Approach, which has gradually been attracting worldwide recognition as a fresh, versatile and practical approach to collaborative decision-making under uncertainty. Starting from basic principles, the book uses helpful diagrams and clear explanations to demonstrate practical ways of approaching daunting decision problems; of devising possible ways forward; and of working effectively towards agreed courses of action. Along he way, decision makers are helped to cope with diverse sources of uncertainty – technical, political, managerial – in a strategic manner. In this extended third edition, the authors have added short contributions from 21 users from seven countries. These new contributors present lessons from their varied experiences in adapting the Strategic Choice Approach to guide decision-making and learning in settings ranging from the re-routing of a controversial city carnival procession to national policy for the management of nuclear waste.

Describes a systems approach to the operation and maintenance of drinking-water and sanitation services in urban areas of developing countries. Addressed to managers and other personnel with decision-making responsibilities, the book responds to ample evidence that poor management has had the greatest single negative impact on the quality of water supply and sanitation services. The guide, which is intended to serve as a reference source and conceptual framework, covers virtually all the procedures, activities, projects, and areas of managerial responsibility, at different levels, needed to ensure that water supply and sanitation services function continuously, efficiently, and to their full capacity. Emphasis is placed on procedures that can help control water losses. The book has five parts. The first describes the use of the management systems approach to analyse the functions of drinking-water and sanitation agencies and to solve operation and maintenance problems. Part two, on management, provides a step-by-step account of the key responsibilities and functions involved in managing an agency's operation and maintenance activities. The third and most extensive part serves as a detailed guide to the planning and control of operation and maintenance procedures. While most attention is given to projects for controlling water loss, part three also covers programmes for controlling the production and quality of drinking-water, and for sewage collection, treatment, re-use, and disposal. The remaining chapters describe information systems and the procedures and stages of implementation. Of particular practical value is a five-page tabular presentation of performance indicators that can be used to assess the effectiveness of specific activities.

Providing a comprehensive overview of various methods and applications in decision engineering, this book presents chapters written by a range experts in the field. It presents conceptual aspects of decision support applications in various areas including finance, vendor selection, construction, process management, water management and energy, agribusiness , production scheduling and control, and waste management. In addition to this, a special focus is given to methods of multi-criteria decision analysis. Decision making in organizations is a recurrent theme and is essential for business continuity. Managers from various fields including public, private, industrial, trading or service sectors are required to make decisions. Consequently managers need the support of these structured methods in order to engage in effective decision making. This book provides a valuable resource for graduate students, professors and researchers of decision analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis and group decision analysis. It is also intended for production engineers, civil engineers and engineering consultants.