Example 1: Directive - working in a new sector, the engineers aren’t aware of the PM processes involved which has led to miscommunication and disorganisation across the project portfolio. For the projects I am managing within the sector, I have adopted a directive style which has involved closer engagement with the technical teams to discuss potential issues and risks and from this, I lead on the conversations to ensure solutions are confirmed and agreed to mitigate the concerns raised and ensure roles and responsibilities are clearly defined.

Example 2: Behavioural

On a project I am managing, the technical team are highly reliable and work independently. Whenever a risk has been flagged, we collaborate and discuss the root cause and all provide an opinion and perspective to resort to an agreed outcome. Decisions make take longer to decide and agree. However, the decision ensures that all stakeholders involved are accounted for and it is the most suitable actionable outcome that will have a minimal impact to those affected.

I use this when team members book to wrong project codes - instead of ‘telling them off’, I take the time to explain which code is correct and why, and if they have any difficulties to approach me and we can sort it together.

I have used conceptual decision making in technology projects. Most of these projects are innovative so there is no ‘blueprint’ of how they should be achieved. Therefore we need to explore a variety of different solutions to decide on the best approach. These do tend to have strict deadlines, and cost limits though, so I will generally use a combination of directive decision making to keep on track, taking experience from similar projects even if they are not exactly the same, and conceptual decision making for complex, brand new elements

I think this is my preferred style, a combination of directive but taking the behaviours of my team and customers into account.

Two of the styles I used interractively, the Analytical and Conceptual.

The Course Management Team had an onerous job matching visiting assessors with students, various aspects had to match, the post code area of the assessor had to be within a radius of 25 miles of the student. They also had to match on education phase, subject matter as well. With the number of students and the number of VA's this process takes about 3 weeks. I created a spreadsheet that would with a few clicks find the matches available with the distances and the user had to press the button created. I used online post code radius searcher and imported all the details for the assessors and by various formulas and analytical working this reduced the job to a couple of days depending on the size of the cohort.

Currently managing and delivering projects within a large CI project. Currently in the planning stage, initial approach to prioritise projects was to create a benefits statement, gap analysis assessment, and impact measures for each project that can be used to assess the alignment with business strategy and overall impact on project success each project.

Resulted in data driven decisions that diligently explained the reasoning for the prioritisation to the exec team.

An example of this is on projects where we've had to re-scope due to budget constraints and I've had to justify why the project is unable to accommodate certain costs by analysing the overall financial position of the project and highlighting the importance of identifying which labour and procurement activities should be prioritised due to their impact on project delivery and which activities can be stopped due to their limited impact on delivery