Decisions are time consuming, often late and possibly neither understood nor supported by the employees. This can be done better and we offer a tool to support you.
We are all decisive as our constituencies expect. But that’s not the point why executing decisions is often so painful.
We must be clear on our decision criteria and the alternatives to choose from, including to do nothing. And both must be clear as well to the ones impacted, in particular the team(s) asked to implement. Transparency creates support and drives execution.
How to do this? Here is the 30 second version:
- You define the decision criteria, e.g. implementation cost, technical risk, or availability of technical experts, and you weight those criteria relative to each other.
- Next you describe possible paths of action, e.g. own product development, sourcing from a third party, strategic partnership, and then evaluate each of those versus the chosen decision criteria.
- The weighting and scoring follows the classic SixSigma approach of using only the odd numbers (1, 3, 5, 7, and 9) with nine being the highest / best.
- For each alternative you multiply score with weight of each criteria and sum those up.
- The alternative with the highest score is the one matching best your decision criteria.
- Less effort as process steps are easy and fast
- Faster decisions due to alignment in criteria and clearly scoped alternatives
- Stronger support by the employees due to transparency (and involvement)
- Easier communication and better documentation
- Accelerated implementation as everyone knows what and why
The decision matrix is integrated in our software tool box that enables strong project execution and building up a knowledge pool. The application is (private-) cloud based and hence immediately available and scalable. Customizations can easily be added.
Beneficial side product of deploying this tool is a consistent documentation ready for the next audit. Associated preparation effort is being reduced and robustness of processes increased.