Three Practical Guidelines for Business Decisions

Michael is the President of Sapir Consulting. He has been providing operational, organizational and management consulting and training for over 14 years. He is a certified project management professional and Gestalt process facilitator, offering training, consulting and solutions development in project and product management, process improvement, leadership and team-building programs.

  Agile   Manufacturing   Strategy  

The following is based on Michael’s best seller: Agile Decisions, Driving Effective Agile Decisions in Busines.

It is a humoristic, practical approach to understanding why decisions are so complex and what can be done about it. In order to create the combination between top-down problem decisions (waterfall-like approaches) and local problem decisions (agile-project approach), here are three practical complex decision-problems guidelines:

1. Simple local rules
2. Strategic top-down rules
3. Visual problem view

Simple local rules
This cannot be overstated. Local rules must be easy to follow. Whether these are rules for: a machine operator, traveling salesperson, a project coordinator or you packing your bags. The local decision rules are the ones mostly used; they must be easy to follow, understandable and unequivocal. Consider the warehouse forklift operator who is re- stocking raw material. If she needs to follow a complex decision protocol for placing newly arrived material in the warehouse, it would result in chaos.

Instead, we need to equip her with an easy-to-follow mechanism for stocking the warehouse. One such mechanism is FIFO: First In First Out. This is also the rule you're following when stocking your fridge with groceries, if you don't want dairy products to go sour.

Supermarkets also follow this rule when their …

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