Decisions for Speed to Market
How to make decisions at speed
Speed to market is increasingly important when you need to respond to business, competitive or market changes. Making a poor decision, implementing a decision poorly or taking too long can cost you money and time, and create stress and frustration.
Here are five steps for deciding at speed:
- Make decisions faster. Often this is about making a choice to decide. Do you need more information, or are you using this as an excuse to procrastinate?
- Sequence your decisions. Make them in the right order. Stat with those with the most expensive and time-consuming dependencies first. You don’t drive to the airport to catch a flight until you have decided where and when you are going to fly.
- Only make decisions once. If you continually revisit decisions then you will create confusion and frustration. As Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and CEO for twenty-two years, said: “I spend much less time and energy worrying about “making the right decision” and much more time and energy ensuring that any decision I make turns out right’.
- Don’t ask everyone to help you decide. You only want to include those whose involvement will improve the decision or who have input that will make it more likely you won’t get vetoed later.
- Triage decisions. Some decisions don’t matter. Some decisions are so unimportant that they are trumped by speed. And a few decisions are worth focusing on.
Use these guidelines to help you improve your speed to market. Don’t try to do everything at once in speeding up your decisions, build up and include that which you are comfortable with. As you become comfortable going faster so your decisions will speed up. Share this with your peers, teams, and colleagues and work on these five steps together!
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