The AAA Decision-Making Framework for Successful Technology Projects
Published: Sunday 15th of December 2024
Implementing new technologies into an organisation means working at pace and meeting tight deadlines. Common obstacles to achieving this are delays in decision-making and bottlenecks caused by leadership approval. These delays can frustrate teams and directly affect project success rates and business outcomes.
When decisions are delayed or postponed, valuable time is wasted, potentially leading to shifting timelines, backlogs in design and development, inefficiencies in resource utilisation, increased project costs and impacts to your budget. At the start of our project we need to examine how we will approach decision-making processes to emphasise faster project execution.
Let me introduce what I call the AAA Decision-Making Framework for tackling this:
- Autonomous Decision-Making
- Accelerating Decision-Making
- Automating Decision-Making
Autonomous Decision-Making
The autonomy to make independent decisions is a critical factor. By devolving decision-making from leadership to team members and subject matter experts, we can streamline decision-making and leverage the collective knowledge and experience of the team. This starts with finding the right people for the right decisions: Strategic, Tactical, and Operational.
Strategic Decisions:
The high-impact decisions that affect scope, timeline, and budget, requires senior leadership involvement. Examples include major scope changes, shifts in project timelines or budget reallocations. Any decisions that are irreversible or that can significantly impact business benefits and go-live dates should only be made by Leadership. Then that’s it Leaders, you’re done, we’re going to trust your talent to do the rest.
Tactical Decisions:
These are medium-impact decisions that might affect resources, schedules, or key system functionality. Examples include decisions on system design that affect multiple business areas, resource reallocations, or system configuration changes. As long as it doesn’t affect your overall scope, budget or timeline these decisions should be made by your leads such as project managers, product owners or workstream leads. Tactical decisions have cross functional boundaries and impact key system build decisions, but they are generally reversible and so should be made by those with detailed expertise and the responsibility for specific project areas.
Operational Decisions:
Low-impact decisions are those that fine-tune individual processes, affect user experience or day-to-day system usage. Examples include tweaks to user interfaces, decisions on process execution or adjustments in process flows. Operational decisions are easily reversible and primarily affect design and execution at a local level. As long as the decisions made align with business goals and do not directly impact timelines or project scope, you need to trust your experts such as business process owners, subject matter experts or super users to make the right call.
Clear definition of these levels enables the right people to make decisions within their expertise domains. This eliminates the bottleneck of getting executive approval for everything. When project team members have trust and autonomy they make faster, better decisions. Ensure your people have:
- Defined boundaries for their decision-making authority
- Information and resources they need
- Regular feedback from stakeholders
- Power to implement their decisions
By devolving decision-making to experts, we can leverage their specialised knowledge and experience. Teams show more ownership when trusted with decisions in their domain. This trust creates a positive cycle where better decisions build confidence and lead to even better choices. Autonomous decision-making enhances the speed, quality and accuracy of decisions made within technology projects.
Accelerating Decision-Making
Once the right level of autonomy is established, we can focus on accelerating decision-making without compromising quality or project momentum. Not all decisions carry the same weight. In technology projects the majority of project decisions fall into the category of reversible tactical and operational decisions, which means we can speed up our processes without adding risk.
We should establish timeframes at the beginning of the project to speed up the decision-making without compromising quality. Deviations from these agreements should be then be escalated to the Project Sponsor as a blocker.
- Strategic decisions: 5-7 business days
- Tactical decisions: 2-3 business days
- Operational decisions: Same business day
Key Principles of Accelerated Decision-Making
1. Data Driven-Making: Encourage your experts to leverage data and analytics to inform decision-making processes. By basing decisions on data-driven insights, we can reduce the reliance on assumptions and intuition, leading to more accurate and justified decisions.
2. Iterative Decision-Making: Rather than attempting to make a single, comprehensive decision, break it down into smaller, incremental decisions. This approach allows for continuous learning and course correction based on new information or changing circumstances, ensuring that decisions remain accurate and aligned with project objectives.
3. Don't Wait for Perfect Information: Most good decisions need only about 70% of the desired information. Waiting too long often costs more than making a slightly imperfect choice.
4. Encourage Peer Reviews: Your experts can choose to get stakeholders to review their proposal for the decision. The reviews should happen simultaneously and be kept within our agreed timeframes. This cuts our decision time but still keeps quality high through seeking different viewpoints.
5. Implement Leadership Retrospectives: Brief, focused review sessions help us stay accountable and learn from our choices. Leadership should be disciplined in ensuring they are coaching their teams to make better decisions in the future, rather than using the time to revisit decisions. These meetings enable leadership to provide positive reinforcement to improve the confidence of their experts and helps us keep improving on the use of the framework. Teams become better at making decisions when they know they are supported to make reversible choices quickly.
6. Clear guidelines for decision escalation: Not every choice needs multiple approvals. Teams can make decisions in their areas while knowing when to escalate important matters.
Organisations that focus on these elements change their culture from overthinking to taking confident, informed action. This leads to faster project delivery, better team participation, improved results, and more trust from leadership.
Automating Decision-Making
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Intelligent Automation, and Machine Learning technologies are increasingly used to support decision-making. AI helps process vast, complex data sets, machine learning continuously adapts by learning from the data and establishing business rules, and then automation can execute the workflows required to execute the decision as a result.
Automating decision-making in the organisation can have a positive impact on the success of technology projects. If we automate routine decisions we can then focus our expertise where it matters most.
The right decisions to automate should:
- Have clear, measurable criteria
- Follow consistent patterns
- Need minimal subjective judgement
- Be reversible if needed
- Affect single functional areas
Automated decision-making can take various forms:
Assisted: AI can be used to analyse data, but we use our people to look at the results and make the actual decisions. This could be for example a functional expert using AI in diagnosing data migration or unit test results, their specialism and experience still trumps AI knowledge, but they will benefit from the acceleration of AI to get through the amount of data required to make the decision.
Augmented: AI could analyse large amounts of historical data and make recommendations based on its knowledge of the patterns and trends indicated in the data, which is then passed to a human to make an informed decision. Consider project managers being able to make the right resourcing decisions or determining deadlines and dependencies if they have the data to look at an organisations prior performance on project execution.
Automated: AI and machine-learning can combine to analyse and learn from the data and decide to take action based on the rules for how the model has been trained to act. A human would simply monitor the results. This could have uses in assigning support tickets without people needing to look at them first or approving requests for additional recruitment within a specific budget. The more routine decisions we can automate, the more we reduce decision fatigue and can use our human brain-power to focus on what really matters.
Do not discount the importance of change management and mindset when implementing automated decision-making. Teams should feel enabled rather than replaced by automated systems. Ensure people feel involved and clearly communicate how automation supports human decision-making by freeing up their time for more valuable activities.
Technology Projects Require Transformational Leadership
Leadership is crucial in shaping the decision-making culture within technology projects. Transformational leaders inspire their teams to think creatively, embrace change, and value open communication. By creating a collaborative environment and empowering team members to leverage their expertise, these leaders can accelerate decision-making and drive progress. The right leadership style leverages the collective intelligence and diverse perspectives of the team, resulting in more informed and effective decisions.
By emphasising autonomy, and the strategic use of technology to support decision-making, leaders can create an environment that not only accelerates project progress but also enhances team satisfaction, strengthens relationships, and aligns everyone towards shared goals. Ultimately, the AAA Decision-Making Framework drives the successful delivery of technology initiatives and ensures the likelihood of long-term success.
