What strategies have you found effective to foster faster decision-making?
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Decision-making is critical and its value and effectiveness depend on the person accountable to make a decision. Now the accountable person is going to delegate. The responsible persons are going to execute. The success factors depend on the perception or the culture. Information on key organizational operational and performance parameters is very important. Benchmarks are also needed to understand the environment. Leadership must uphold ethics and a right reward system. When an organization has all this then it can execute decision-making playbooks and that will enable effective and faster decision-making.
Part of the IT governance, I have formed an IT steering committee that meets on weekly basis and is responsible for taking strategic decisions. As for tactical decisions that are inline with the approved strategy and have a low financial impact, it is more effective to empower middle management.
IT was always on the spot to explain how we make architectural decisions so I made an enterprise architecture set of principles with my head of enterprise architecture. Because the conversation was absolutely stuck—we couldn't talk about any of the business capabilities we needed until IT did this. It was unbelievable. Once we did it, everybody understood and we could all move on. Especially when you have a cross-functional initiative, you need something that aligns the groups.
At Amazon they implemented the use of tenants to empower decision-making within a team without having to escalate to upper management. Each team has a unique set of tenants—another way to describe guardrails. The idea is that the decision-making process in finance is different to somebody that's in engineering. Every team is responsible for developing tenants that are specific to them.
If you're raising decisions up to upper management, that’s an indicator that you may have the wrong tenants in place. There's a belief that upper management should spend the majority of their time focusing on strategic decisions that take advantage of the experiences you have accumulated during the course of your career. And that's the best place you could put it.
Even if you come up with the right guiding principles, you have to trust the levels above you will support those principles as well. Because the last thing you need is somebody way up coming in at the very end to say, "No, I don't think that's a good idea."
Clear DACI: driver, accountable, consulted, informed. The driver identifies the final decision maker and rational on why them.
A 1-2 pager max on opportunity or problem statement, options considered and rational behind the option being recommended. Ideally supported by business objectives and or KPI’s and or values etc depending on the decision.
A and C’s are engaged and review the proposal, Driver closes the input and moves to decision making..