Making good decisions in early drug discovery.

The earliest phases of drug discovery require diverse scientific disciplines to work hand in hand to address many unknowns. Good decision making is crucial for success in this context and, yet, the topic of sound planning has rarely been addressed for the earliest stages of drug discovery. We propose a tailored, qualitative 'decision quality' process that can serve as a guide toward generating project plans optimized to address a given project situation. Furthermore, we propose a visual flow-chart format for the selected plan that includes key decisions and activities, together forming a decision roadmap of the plan. We illustrate each step of the process by means of a real-life example and provide recommendations for its implementation.