How do you get to market faster than the competition? How do you become more efficient? How do you save time, money and frustration? In my view, it all comes down to the decisions we make and how we make them.
- Make quick, well informed decisions: You rarely need more time to make a decision. In most cases you must simply choose to decide. Ask yourself if you need more data, or is more time merely a way to postpone the decision?
- Understand that time is limited: I hate to break it to you, but your time is finite, you can’t buy more time. But you can bring in expertise to drive a project forwards and help speed up, and improve the quality of, your decision making process.
- Make decisions in the right order: Make the decisions with the most expensive and time-consuming dependencies first.
- Make decisions once: Unless new information gives you a good reason to change your mind, give your decisions time.
- Don’t bring everyone into the decision: Only ask the people who will either improve the decision you are making, or who have input that will impact the decision later in the project.
- Focus on the big decisions: A few decisions are worth focusing on, whereas some decisions simply don’t require that much attention.
- Engage others with your decisions: Once a big decision is made, you need to being the rest of the team along with you. Remind them of the rationale and data behind the decision.
In many cases, your speed to market is down to the speed and quality of your decision making. Once you are comfortable with going fast, you will fly.