Making a Decision – 7 Situations Begging for Quick Decisions

Seven Situations Begging for Quick Decisions

Making a Decision - Quick DecisionThinking back to client situations over the past few years, here are seven types of decision making situations across three different categories where too much time often gets spent debating and considering actions.

Non-Strategic Decisions

1. Non-strategic issues – We talk about strategic issues as those that “matter” for an organization. If a decision making outcome won’t matter that much, don’t spend that much time on it.

2. Changes to processes customers won’t experience – For as much as we talk about the need for strategic change, invest more time deciding about changes customers will notice than background processes they won’t ever experience.

3. There’s a track record from previous decision making – Especially in big corporations with lots of administrative functions, it’s possible for employees to spend way too much time on decision making about simple issues primarily important to them. If your organization has a solid history or guidelines to shape decision making, use them and invest your efforts on newer, more speculative decisions.

There Are Multiple Options that Could Suffice

4. You can recover from making a decision that’s off the mark – If your environment is one where it’s relatively easy to try things, learn, and adapt, you’re in a lot better situation to make a quick decision and launch into implementation.

5. You’re making a decision from among multiple choices customers will accept – Don’t waste too much time debating changes to product or service features low on the list of things customers care about or notice. Invest the time saved into stronger implementation.

Limited Resource Are Available

6. You’ll spend more on making a decision than the decision costs – In a meeting-happy organizational culture, you can wind up with multiple meetings to consider and debate even small questions. If you’re spending $5,000 in employee time (yes in a staff role, you still have an hourly rate) to make a $1,000 decision, STOP!

7. You’re trying to decide about things you’ll never be able to do – We definitely encourage thinking big and considering possibilities well beyond today. But when it gets down to prioritization and decision making time, it’s time to decide on things you will be able to implement and not just be able dream about for an extended period.

Strategies for Finishing a Project

One topic was how they finish projects for customers. While this step could be treated as an afterthought, it’s actually a critical stage on multiple dimensions. If it’s done thoroughly and promptly, it leads to greater success and satisfaction for clients and stronger profitability for the company. Done poorly (i.e., dragging on too long), it can trigger client dissatisfaction on an otherwise successful project and deteriorate profitability as project managers rack up uncompensated hours and can’t move to other projects.

Thinking about it later, finalizing a project is an important phase to have end really well for any project-based business, whether you’re serving external or internal clients.

From working with our client and thinking about this strategic, final step, here are questions we’re considering for Brainzooming™ that apply broadly:

Near project’s end, are we revisiting the deliverables and to-do lists, updating and aggressively managing open issues?

Are there clear cues signaling we’re done with the project?

Does the client fully understand its role in working with the output and implementing it successfully after the project is handed over?

What specific questions are we asking to gauge how well we delivered? Are we addressing any points of concern promptly and satisfactorily?

Are we asking for referrals?

Project Management Tips – 8 Signs a Creative Project Is Done

Multiple Ways to Be Done

When you are working intensely on completing a creative project, it is easy to block out anything other than the deadline and the steps you have identified you need to complete to measure your progress.

If that is the case though, you may miss that despite the fact that even though the calendar deadline and the steps for project completion have not synced up, your creative effort is effectively done.

As a recovering perfectionist, I have become particularly attuned to my own and others’ incessant tinkering on a project that could clearly be considered done. It’s the “just can’t leave it alone” syndrome in project management which sometimes leads to improvements on a project, but can just as easily translate into wasted time that you could apply to a new creative effort, if you were just willing to move on to something else.

8 Signs a Creative Project Is Done

The Twitter exchange got me thinking about these eight project management tips to suggest where a project is “done” even though the calendar and your perceptions of the level of completion suggest it isn’t done:

• You bit a creative block and can’t advance the creative effort any further –even if the calendar says it isn’t done yet.
• The strategic direction for the project from management has changed to a new path.
• Your support team has mentally quit on you and/or the effort.
• Your options in continuing to work on the project are worse than your options from stopping work.
• A stakeholder tells you he/she is happy with its completion and outcome.
• Everybody has gone home – physically, mentally, or virtually.
• You have run out of time to complete it and can’t negotiate for any more time.
• Others view the effort as a success, even if you don’t quite yet.

These were the first eight I wrote down; surely there are more than this.

Project Management – 15 Techniques When Time Is Running Down

• Figure out what we’re delivering that hasn’t been promised and stop spending time on these things.
• Cut out clear “nice to haves.”
• Eliminate unexpected things whose absence won’t be missed.
• Remove things whose presence just makes the overall project look more incomplete.
• Work with an explicit “better done than perfect” mentality.
• Go with “high-probability” answers (vs. waiting around for “certain” answers).
• Identify things with longer lead times or that someone else still needs to work on, and get them done first.
• Force making decisions (and then not revisiting them any further).
• Check if there are alternative organizational approaches for the project that move it to completion more rapidly.
• Ask for help from incredibly dependable team members (if they haven’t been involved in the effort already).
• Create a new to do list with color coding to make important tasks stand out.
• Start assembling physical elements of the project in an open space (when working with computer files, create a new empty folder of final deliverables so it’s clear what’s done).
• Develop a negotiating strategy if it appears trade-offs will need to be made with the end client.
• Make a short list of things easily addressed or fixed “later than sooner.”
• Think more, talk less, and do – like crazy!

That’s what I came up with trying to think about situations when time has been running down on projects previously.

Checklists – Helping Visualize the Uncertain When Plans Fall Through

During a “major winter weather event” (KC television weather jargon for “snow”), I was monitoring

the weather by looking out the window and watching The Weather Channel. I was unaware that our airport had been closed for hours until my traveling companion called to ask when I was going to the airport and what my alternatives were.

It was suddenly essential to develop a checklist to evaluate viable options so that our trip didn’t fall apart. The resulting checklist works in many instances where a plan looks as if it’s in jeopardy of not succeeding:

Identify critical plan priorities that can’t be compromised. (We had to arrive Sunday night; all else could be adjusted on the road.)

Increase flexibility / options right away to be able to still achieve the priorities. (That meant downsizing my checked bag to a carry-on in 5 minutes and getting to the airport ASAP to have the opportunity to make more flight options.)

Secure access to the necessary information flow. (We determined that on the ground info was our best source – first at the counter, then at the gate.)

Develop likely scenarios and their implications. (Since it was an airport-wide delay, we had to get as early a flight as possible, while being prepared to catch the latest connecting flight possible.)

Secure the resources to operate in the most likely scenarios. (Our important resources were charged phones, water and food to take along, and each other – splitting up & teaming as necessary to get to the front of the customer service line ASAP.)

The end result? We made it on an earlier scheduled flight that left an hour after our original plane was supposed to depart. Our 2-hour Chicago layover was consumed by the delay; we walked off the plane in Chicago and went right to our original connecting flight. We had food because we’d planned ahead, so it wasn’t a big deal to miss eating at Midway. We arrived only 15 minutes late vs. the prospect of arriving 5 hours late. And the checklist made all the difference!

Built for Discomfort – An Alternative Prioritization Strategy for Innovation

Does you work group repeatedly gravitate toward familiar ideas when innovation possibilities are
considered? If that’s so, here’s an alternative prioritization strategy that could help break the cycle. It’s a typical four box prioritization grid, but with a twist.

Use “ease of implementation” for one axis, with a range of “simple” to “complex” to implement. On the other axis, instead of the more typical “expected benefit,” use the “level of comfort with the idea” and a “very” to “not very” scale (as shown in the diagram). Having your group prioritize ideas in this way opens up new areas of discussion on tendencies you have to prefer familiar, non-innovative ideas.

For simple, but uncomfortable ideas, focus on understanding what creates discomfort about the innovation. For uncomfortable ideas more complex to implement, probe on whether there’s long-term potential that could create competitive advantage (or look for ways to implement the idea with greater ease). The key with both cells is getting to the heart of the innovation discomfort. Is it because there are significant flaws in the idea or is it really because the idea is new, challenging, and unfamiliar? If it’s the latter, that’s often a clear sign that the idea could yield tremendous potential for customers who aren’t part of inertia inside a company that thwarts developing new products and services.
For ideas seen as very comfortable, the vital question is how to inject new features and benefits making them more viable yet potentially increasing internal discomfort.

Twenty-One Project Management Implications of Wanting Things FAST

Saying You Want Something FAST Won’t Make It So
For all the desire to have projects or work processes move REALLY FAST, it seems, especially in
larger organizations, cultural forces work against projects moving FAST despite what project stakeholders expect.

The reason is a desire for FAST doesn’t mean anybody wants the related project management implications:

Rearranging what’s important
Saying what you’re going to do
Doing what you say
Working from a strong to-do list
Giving more effort
Focusing attention
Not depending on people who’ve never been dependable
Motivating /encouraging /cajoling / bribing people who have been dependable before to do even more
Anticipating project management roadblocks
Addressing potential project management roadblocks before they’re reached
Spending money wisely to eliminate other roadblocks
Sharing vital information that allows people to act
Being responsive
Making decisions to not pursue every possible idea
Handling trade-offs
Acting instead of delaying
Hitting deadlines
Speaking now or forever holding your peace
Ignoring “nice to have” opinions but getting all the “must have” opinions
Getting out of the way when you’re not critical
Caring more or caring less – whichever moves things along
FAST is easy to say. Its project management implications are hard (sometimes apparently impossible) to stomach inside an organization.