Transform decision-making to increase the speed and quality of work

Does the decision-making process need to transform when enabling Agility?

In hierarchical organizations, some decisions take months to make.

And many cross-team decisions take weeks to make.

It's unacceptable for leaders who recognize the benefits of speed and flow.

What's the reason for decisions to be so time-consuming?

The short answer is - siloed teams, lack of authority, and lack of context.

When teams and groups specialize in certain areas of the product, they form their specific lists of priorities.

When a company forms a deep hierarchy, the higher echelons of management have a broader context.

But any specialization in decisions requires batching and, subsequently – queueing.

Also, it requires the flow of information from the teams up to the decision-makers.

Suppose a team can't decide about changing a software component because of the dependency on another team. In that case, a request must be submitted, reviewed, prioritized, and put into a queue.

First, all of those activities would be a waste if the original team is empowered to decide and has the right context to do it.

Even larger waste happens after the work is getting blocked. Instead of completing the highest priority work, the team has to stop it and shift to another, lower priority work, which is not blocked yet.

All these changes must be communicated to the management to keep them aware of the current state of work just in case some decisions need to be made at their level.

Transferring context takes time and effort. Also, the context gets distorted during the transfer.

Notably, in most cases, upper management just shrugs their shoulders and doesn't make any decisions.

Sometimes they negotiate with each other as if the priorities on their level are not entirely clear.

Managers discuss why teams with higher priority tasks must drop what they do and help teams working on lower priority tasks.

What is the most common case in negotiation? It is when parties clarify what negative impacts the company may have in case some of the work is not getting done on time. Such negotiations are common among the leaders of the groups working in silos.

The decision-making process must be rebuilt from the ground up to speed up the development flow.

The transformation of decision-making doesn't mean people need to send more emails to each other. It doesn't mean holding additional meetings or hiring extra managers to handle blockers.

Transformation means that the decision-making must stay within a single team. This team should be able to access the necessary context to make the right decisions.

How to make sure that each team can access the right context to make the right decisions quickly?

Here's where managers can help to set up a system where the context becomes widely available and transparent to all teams.

The manager must be accountable if a team can't make a good enough decision quickly.

If a team decides without considering vital information, then the managers must be asked why this context is not transparent enough for this team and why the team doesn't have the skills to take advantage of it.

Agile managers work hard to make the context available and build a system to effortlessly distribute essential information across teams.

Agile managers don't manage people, priorities, or project timelines. They manage context and the system to help teams succeed with their decisions and development speed.

Company leaders, hold managers accountable for the right things.

Enable your teams to make quick and accurate decisions to increase throughput and quality.

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