Big Sky Thinking

I recently visited a client site to participate in the definition of a consulting project that had been broadly scoped, but that required decisions to be fleshed out in terms of specific project objectives, scope, and key performance metrics.

Most of the management group that would be affected by the project was in attendance, including representatives from logistics, operations, and marketing. They were knowledgeable individuals, well motivated, and responsible for many key decisions in their functional areas. Though eventually successful, it was a long meeting, and we had some trouble honing in to the key elements of scoping the project. To some extent, this should be expected, especially for a complex decision making problem.

Yet, as I reflected on the meeting, I realized that there were certain steps we could have followed that would have been helpful for the task at hand, improved decision quality, and lowered the complexity and time involved in concluding our discussions

1. Define decision making boundaries for the project at the very outset. What is excluded is as important if not more important than what is included inside the decision making framework.
   
2. Reduce the fuzziness in the project definition to the extent as possible through a precise definition of the roles of each constituent group involved.
3. Reduce the decision to a well defined process at the right level in the organization. I have written on this issue in an earlier blog entry.
4. Create project timelines with periodic milestones consisting of broad work structures, with specific attention paid to how the project scope agreed upon would mesh with those milestones.
   
5. Define key performance indicators that would be used to measure project success, and directly link them with final project scope and definition agreed upon by everyone.
6. Create consensus by explicitly seeking inputs for each of these steps from all the key stakeholders present at the meeting.
7. Revisit and re-iterate the steps in the order listed if stuck in discussions that seem to be stalling. Long discussions on performance indicators for instance may be driven more by not having followed the earlier steps (such as defining project boundaries or process level of analysis) rather than by a lack of understanding on what is important for measurement purposes.

While individual situations vary, following these steps will in all likelihood accelerate the project scoping process, reduce fuzziness associated with multiple constituencies focusing their attention on different levels of analysis, and create defined goals and timelines. It will also result in a decision making charter for the project that will have a greater chance for success and goal attainment.

Labels: business process, change management, decisions, facilitation