Link to the study - European Parliament - Europa

Policy Department D: Budgetary Affairs
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While errors or failures in operational decisions can cause considerable losses or damages, errors or
failures in strategic decisions have much larger consequences. That is why strategic decisions, as preplanned
by the management, should be subject to a decision making under control: an independent
supervisory board should:
Evaluate the proposed plans;
Request the presentation of alternatives to those plans;
Request a risk evaluation for the technical and financial implications of the plan(s);
Finally decide on the plan.
The effect of double-checking strategic decisions is that all risks are better assessed and a more
reasonable risk decision can be taken.
To set up an effective management and control regime, it is a central requirement to define strategic
decisions to be prepared by the management and finally to be decided from the control institution,
and to define operational decisions to solely be decided by the management. If this discrimination is
either not clearly defined, is not respected or is unclear:
Strategic decisions are either not taken (management waits for decisions of the control
institution) or with a high risk of failure (management decides and acts on its own);
Operational decisions are unnecessarily delayed because the control institution is unable to
decide, is unwilling to take every-day-decisions or decides in a wrong way due to limited expert
knowledge;
Operational decisions are unnecessarily decided by the control institution, with the result that
the management is not responsible any more, looses competency, etc.;
The responsibility for decisions cannot be clearly assigned or is diluted between two
organisations that claim that either none of them or both of them are responsible.
In all the named cases sub-optimal conditions result that can cause immense difficulties for the
process.
Figure 11 lists examples of typical strategic decisions as well as operational decisions in
decommissioning.
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