Drive Success With a Decision-Making Process Built on Consensus By Peter Tarhanidis
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Organizations are constantly transforming their operating models and processes and investing in new technologies to achieve their business strategy.
While project leaders are focusing on executing that strategy through the discipline of project management, they are also navigating complex environments and undefined hierarchies. In some cases, initiatives stall until a path forward is agreed upon.
Establishing a decision-making process to reach consensus early in projects will ensure higher success rates. To determine a decision-making process, start by assessing the following four tensions:
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Culture
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Decision rights
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Existing policies and approaches
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Global and social influences that impact decision-making
I used this assessment approach on a recent project to ensure stakeholder and team alignment. I was able to define a procure-to-pay process that fit the culture of the organization, and stakeholders subscribed to it.
I also was able to assign decision rights across the project budget so that the suppliers and the project team would collaborate constructively during trade-off discussions and maintain the project scope.
Next, to maintain budget adherence I aligned contract and payment policies to our suppliers’ practices to validate terms, work in progress and work completed against estimates. Lastly, I was able to ensure that changes to the project scope and budget were clearly a result of sponsor-requested alterations and not due to scope mismanagement.
Looking at these four tensions helped me identify decision-making criteria that drove team collaboration, transparency in project drivers, and alignment with sponsors to meet the strategic plan. As teams endure increasing change initiatives or complex programs, many varied stakeholders will need to be engaged to ensure consensus.
Of course, project leaders can determine what other approaches exist to drive consensus early in the project initiation phase. Some examples to leverage might include:
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Robert’s Rules of Order
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Hierarchical authorization legends that define approval levels
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Operational structures that require cross-functional collaboration to drive consensus
Being aware of tensions in the decision-making process and operating structures allows project leaders to succeed in building consensus to achieve organizational goals with less complexity.
Posted
by
Peter Tarhanidis
on: May 15, 2015 10:00 AM |
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Comments (1)
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Sujith Kattathara
Founder, CEO| FreelanceTeams Private Limited
Ernakulam, Kerala, India
Peter
Consensus may be a very expensive approach (in terms of schedule & efforts) to setting project directions.
I agree that in a multi-cultural/ multi-location/ virtual teams scenario, understanding cultural diversity & its impacts is critical to project success. If the cultural differences are not clearly understood, there is danger that different groups may translate directions differently, leading to chaos & rework.
I also agree that documenting a clear set of roles & responsibilities (Org structure, RACI Matrix) are critical to ensuring that all impacted stakeholders understand the expectations from them, and fulfill these expectations.
But I also believe that in any reasonably complex project scenario, there would exist stakeholders with conflicting or tangential expectations, and the PM (and the Project Sponsor) have their larger responsibility of negotiating the "best" approach. During this exercise, sometimes a hard stand will need to be taken, which serves to move the stalled project forward. If a PM does not do this, then the project would simply spin its wheels.
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