Better Management Decisions
-- A Dynamic Approach
Assessing your management decision process to guide strengthening efforts and to provide a baseline for evaluating results can be a significant task. It requires collecting data on past decisions, summarizing and integrating input from several sources, developing an appropriate success metric, and evaluating a sizable number of decisions. There is, however, an alternative:
Assess your decision process going forward, rather than looking back at past decisions, as part of a decision strengthening program.
A "dynamic" approach of this nature generates a baseline of decision results over some future period, probably two or three years. Meanwhile, you can be strengthening each significant decision as you go by adding some relatively simple, but potentially powerful, steps to your process.
Three Steps to Better Management Decisions
Making decisions while observing the decision process in real-time requires not much more than adding decision mapping, developing of some decision success metrics and evaluating progress and success, and routine feedback of process lessons learned. For each significant decision, you would:
Map Your Decision Develop a decision map that summarizes important aspects of your decision situation. This map will serve as a checklist that critical steps have not been omitted. It will also provide a valuable reference as each decision process evolves from need to action to results.
Track Your Progress Identify a set of metrics for the decision that will help you assess progress and provide early warning of potential problems. Some of these can be drawn from your routine management reporting system, while others may have to be manually extracted from progress reports. You will normally want to track progress toward key milestones, adding to your decision map brief descriptions of obstacles emerging and being addressed and any other information that will help you assess results.
Assess Your Results When primary implementation is over, you should assess the early results against your success criteria. Then, at one or two points subsequently, reassess the results in terms of rollout, adoption, longer-term results, and other aspects of the ultimate outcome. Part of this final step is feeding lessons learned back into the decision process.
Decision Mapping
A decision map is nothing more than a summary of factors important to a particular decision. It can be drawn up using a simple word-processing or spreadsheet table. The primary purpose of a decision map is to consolidate decision information into a single, convenient reference document. You do not want to have to plow through 10 or 20 pages of material to understand how and why a decision was made.
Decision map content will probably vary with the type of decision being made. Some will need special sections to record unique aspects of a decision. Most, however, will need only the content listed in Table 1. Major and complex decisions may require several pages of content but the goal should be to convey the main points as concisely as possible.
þ Brief description of the situation requiring a decision to made
þ A list of parties who would be involved in or affected by the decision
þ Brief description of stakes involved
þ Summary of input obtained from others
þ Core strengths of the organization that must be protected
þ Brief descriptions of initial steps and outcomes
þ List of action alternatives that were developed and considered
þ Most likely outcomes for each action option
þ Brief descriptions of obstacles facing each decision
þ Criteria used in choosing among action alternatives
þ Criteria to be used in evaluating success of decision results
þ Decision selected and special considerations, if any
þ Action outline
Progress Tracking
Use of a decision map will begin to change your decision process. You will be less likely to omit critical steps or commit prematurely to a course of action. Recording key points will provide an opportunity to reflect. Sharing of the map will enhance communication and encourage additional input. The ability to see the whole picture in one place may help you and others see new action options.
Once the action phase has begun, you need to track progress of the decision process itself, not just the project that may have been initiated by the decision. Progress tracking here mainly involves updating the decision map to reflect changes and new information, as well as any adjustments made to the decision itself. Especially where sequential decisions are needed, the decision map can be a valuable tool for tracking the evolution of a complex decision process through a number of steps.
Decision map updating can also provide the discipline needed to be sure that all of the important aspects are being addressed. It is so easy to forget or ignore critical details until they create some kind of crisis. Updating can provide an opportunity to review the process itself, even briefly, and identify any weaknesses that are evident. This can lead to corrective measures being developed and applied as early in the process as possible when costs of doing so are lowest.
Evaluating Success in Improving Decisions
Outcome assessment can provide you with valuable feedback on your decision process. You may be able to identify factors or actions that were especially important in determining the outcome. If the decision led to a "successful" outcome, then these factors can be fed back into the management decision process as guidelines. Adverse outcomes offer other lessons such as practices and approaches to avoid, ways to improve flexibility in action plans, and signals that may have warned of emerging problems.
Communicating and applying these lessons will help strengthen your decision process. You may, however, also wish to evaluate the degree of strengthening, or progress, through the use of some concrete metrics. You might choose to construct a decision quality index that consolidates several important decision metrics and use this index to evaluate overall progress in strengthening your decision-making. What should be included here?
To assess overall decision success, the decision study employed a relatively small number of mostly qualitative metrics. These metrics, summarized below in Table 2, capture essential aspects of decision quality. You may, however, want to elaborate on this list to include factors important to your organization specifically or to address areas of decision-making weakness identified by your assessment.
Table 2. Success Measures Used in the Decision Study
þ Decision Value
IMPACT — made decision contribution, helpful in several ways, helpful in very few ways, helpful very little, not helpful.
MERIT — exceptional, meritorious, average, marginal, none
SATISFACTION — satisfied, moderately satisfied, neutral, moderately dissatisfied, dissatisfied
þ Development Time
ELAPSED TIME — months from initiation to end of development [pre-use] plus from initial use to end of development efforts.
EVALUATION OF ELAPSED TIME — well above, above, as expected, below, well below expectations
þ Decision Use
INITIAL ADOPTION — were [results of] decision used after development?
SUSTAINED ADOPTION — were [results of] decision in use two years after development?
FULL ADOPTION — were [results of] decision fully adopted by intended users?
One success metric that you might want to consider adding is satisfaction with decision outcome by other than the primary decision-makers. This would capture stakeholder satisfaction, which can be extremely important to achieving overall success. You may also want to add metrics specific to various types of decisions. Technology decisions, for example, may need to look at actual cost relative to projected cost. You may want to assess time taken vs. estimated implementation time. For some types of decisions, you may include measures of customer or user satisfaction, cost reduction achieved, and similar specifics. In most cases, the set of metrics used to determine overall success will evolve from actual use.
Identifying Payback
We began with the statement that that decision process weaknesses can lead to huge amounts of time, effort and money being spent each year to achieve unsuccessful outcomes. But the results of better decision-making may not be easy to see in terms of such savings.
Payback generally appears in not having to fix problems created by flawed decisions, not having to abandon outcomes that ultimately don't work as expected, and not having to spend money and time correcting the results of flawed decisions later on. It is usually tough to measure the amounts of money not spent and thus tough to get a handle on payback.
Better management decisions will ultimately show up in the operating results of your organization. Money, time and effort previously spent dealing with flawed decisions will be re-directed to more productive uses, which should improve operating performance in many areas. Again, it will usually be hard to tell if this improvement is in any way related to your decision process improvements.
Payback from decision process improvements probably cannot be determined except in a few special situations. In general, the best that you will be able to say is that you are making a greater number of more successful decisions, as confirmed by your success metric or index, and fewer weak decisions.
Management decision processes in organizations are not cast in stone, a unique product of each specific culture and its people that cannot be strengthened. These processes determine to a major extent the long-term success of your organization. Any significant improvement in decision quality among your managers and executives will translate with certainty into a more successful operation.
Getting Help
The process just outlined is a fairly simple one that should be readily implemented by any experienced manager without outside assistance. However, for those who would like to get some help, we can offer some ideas on where help might be of most value. More... è
ç Back
 |
PLEASE TELL US — Was this material of any value to you? |
If you have questions, or would like to discuss strengthening your organization's management decision process, please contact us.