Just a quick snippet of (ironically) a concept that I’ve been playing with recently. What I’ve been wondering about how better to describe the decision making process which will be inherent throughout a lengthy project life cycle and ensure effective decision making in project teams?
So what’s the problem with the decision making process?
Well the particular decision process that I see as a major road block on a number of project teams is the one that requires specific individuals usually the PM with delegations in certain areas to specialists to make all the decisions.
At first that doesn’t seem to bad, however, it doesn’t allow for effective decision making in project teams, always moving in the best direction then this can really start to slow things up when people need to be waited on for a decision, particularly if an individual is absent for any length of time – days and sometimes weeks can be lost in this manner.
A second problem you may see is one of escalating the problem away from the field of expertise i.e. the person best situated to answer the problem is actually the one having the issue – they either just don’t know how to answer the question yet because of a lack of context or they don’t feel they can because of a lack of authority.
These are both areas that can be dealt with by introducing what I’ll term a “concept” into you project as a means of managing decision making. Concepts will be made of up two areas the what and the how, with the what stating the intent of this concept and the how telling you how it will be applied and how you will check that it’s being applied correctly.
The stated intents need not be long complex discussions on what you’re trying to achieve but rather a short well defined and understood list of what is cheifly important about the approach to project delivery, an example could be that the stated intent is to get something out quick and fast and then fix up once feedback is received, other intents may follow up projects that can be used as handy scope containers.
The how should also be kept nice and simple so that these ideas can live happily at the back of your teams mind without causing distraction. For example this concept is the most important and we’ll quickly review decisions made in the daily stand up next day.
I’m hoping to flesh this out a little more over the next few weeks, but I would be interested to hear and respond to any comments on this area?
Pic from theswedish on sxc.hu
GHTime Code(s): nc
