This is a guest post by Shabana Shiliwala, who owns The Financial Sort, a financial planning company based in Austin, Texas.
Is your project not flowing smoothly? If you’re plagued with missed deadlines, overspending or incomplete tasks, it’s time to find out what’s clogging the pipes. A clue is that these blunders are often related to each other. For example, when overlooked tasks are discovered, going into emergency mode to complete them can require employees to work overtime, which pushes the project over budget. So if these problems are related, there must be a single culprit behind them. The usual suspect? Decisions aren’t being made efficiently. Find out what’s preventing the right people from making the decisions that will get your project flowing again.
Meetings. Think about how long it takes to organize a meeting, maneuver schedules so that all the major players can attend, keep it focused and obtain a consensus by the time it’s finished. Don’t forget the likelihood that more meetings will be required. When too many decisions are dependent on meetings, it’s no wonder your project is being held up. Keep the meetings at a minimum.
Approval channels. Decisions that can only be made after being approved by several levels of management can significantly slow down a project. All that time when staff are making presentations and waiting for approval to accomplish tasks is time they aren’t spending working on the project. Why does management need to be involved in every decision? The staff who are working on the project every day know best what needs to be done, so give them the freedom to fix minor problems and pivot the direction of the project when they think it’s necessary, leaving only major decisions to be reviewed by management.
Large groups. The theory behind juries is that when more people are involved in making a decision, it will lead to better decisions. Watch any legal drama television show and you’ll see that the drawback is how long it takes to get through everyone’s opinions and objections to come to an agreement. In your project, you have to maximize every minute, so get the results you want by limiting specific decisions to only those who are most qualified to make them. For example, leave the user experience decisions to the user experience designers instead of the entire software development group. A smaller team can be more agile in making decisions, allowing the project to move forward faster.
Bring your project back on time, on budget and on task by asking yourself who, what, when, where and how are decisions being made. Providing people the flexibility to make quick decisions may be just what you need to clear up that clog in your project.
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