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

In our previous post in this series, "Why optimizing decisions is the most important thing you can do," we discussed the reasons why organizations should think hard about focusing on the critical decisions in their organizations, and why the speed and quality of those decisions will determine which organizations remain competitive. Today's discussion outlines our approach to optimizing decision-making in your organization.

Organizations that want to make better decisions, faster should adopt a decision-centric approach to improving business processes and their core capabilities. This approach, which we call Decision-Centric Business Improvement, is a four-step technique that requires the identification of critical capabilities, the description of those capabilities in terms of a process, the isolation of the critical decisions in that process, and the optimization of those decisions. At a high level it looks like this:

1. Identify core capabilities. First and foremost, every organization must understand those very few things at which it must be great. Not just good or very good, but great. Many organizations know what those things are; it might be research and development, it might be sourcing, it might be hiring, or it might be project management. In the diagram above, the circle represents just such a capability.
   


2. Describe it as a process. Second, every capability should be expressed in terms of a process. Whether your process is simple or complex, all have key elements in common, including: tasks, inputs, outputs, and decisions. After you know which capabilities are most important, they should be detailed in a business process that can be decomposed and analyzed.
   
   
3. Identify the important decisions. Third, the organization should highlight and understand the decisions in the processes. Most processes--and all important processes--contain decisions. Those decisions vary in complexity, importance, and frequency, but they are the turning points of every process. In the diagram above, the decisions are indicated as diamonds.
   
   
4. Optimize the critical decisions. Once it's clear where the decisions are in your most important processes, proceed with optimizing the most important decisions (the ones with the biggest impact on the process outcomes). Big Sky advocates evaluating each of these decisions from three angles: strategic relevance, technique, and technology. In other words, "why make the decision," "how to make the decision," and "what do we need to do to enable the decision."
   

Although the scope and duration of these engagements will vary with the size and complexity of the organization, we suggest starting small with a rapid diagnostic using this approach, and then layering on more challenging improvements over multiple project generations.

In our next post in this series, we will outline each of the three "decision angles" mentioned in #4 above.

Labels: Decision-Centric Business Improvement, decisions, methodology, triangle