Transcript:
Hello and welcome to our impactful projects and Planning series. I'm Jami Yazdani.

In today's session, what we're going to talk about is how a lack of clarity in decision making stalls projects, and what we can do about it, and so recently, I've worked with several clients to assess their project environment, to help them build better project management processes and ways of working. What I keep hearing about is a challenge that is slowing down their projects, project decision making. Again and again, folks within nonprofits tell me that their projects stall at the point where a decision needs to be made. A lack of clarity and decision making is slowing down projects. It's also creating stress for folks involved in the project. They aren't sure who should be making a decision, how the decision should be made, and how to move those decisions forward in a way that supports the project. What I'm hearing from folks is, do I keep bugging the decision maker? How do I move forward if I don't have a clear decision or consensus? Again, projects are stalling, and folks who already have enough on their plates are stressed because of a lack of clarity in project decision making. Working with these clients, we've developed strategies to mitigate this project decision making challenge, and that's what I want to share with you today, some of what I've been working on and implementing with my own clients.

So I've got three recommendations for you today. One, we want to better incorporate decisions into your project plans. Two, we want to prepare decision makers and plan to support them in making decisions. Three, we want to reflect on decision making so that you can improve future projects and decisions. So let's dive into these recommendations. My first recommendation is to incorporate decisions and decision making into your project plan. So if decision making is a challenge and it's a barrier in your projects, it's something we want to try and mitigate through good planning. So we can start by considering what decisions need to be made during a project. When we talk about project decisions, I mean those decisions that need to be made once the project begins. Of course, there are decisions to make to start a project, but today I'm really focusing on the ones that come after project work has begun the types of decisions that we can incorporate into project planning. One of the most common project decisions is the approval of deliverables. As we create deliverables in our projects, they often require a sign off. We may need to get an okay before moving from a draft or beta stage into something we can actually deliver to our users. Another common type of project decision occurs when you're working on a project with several phases or key milestones. Often we need to get approval from someone to move to the next phase or complete a milestone. Another common decision is communication approvals. If your project involves communication with key or external stakeholders, you may need approvals before sharing reports or sending out communications. And projects often require approvals to use funding or make large purchases. We may also need approvals to make changes to the project itself, such as extending timelines, adding stakeholders, or changing deliverables. While this isn't something that we would necessarily put in the project plan, it is a common project decision. So these common types of decisions can slow down our projects if we have not planned for them, and so to avoid delays, we want to document these decisions and incorporate them into our project plan. Each decision can become a task or a milestone in the project. We can document the decision that needs to be made and assign it a due date. We can also document how long folks have to make the decision, and who is the ultimate owner of that decision.

We can see here that we have several decisions added to our project plan as tasks, and so the decisions are listed as approvals or sign offs. They include an owner or assignee, and they have a due date. There are also start dates here, so that we have a timeline of how long the owner has to make the decision. By adding these decision points to your project timeline with clear due dates and owners, much like we add deliverables and tasks, we are creating visibility into the decision.

Decisions necessary to move our project forward, we're also setting clear expectations for the decision maker and your project team on when the decision must be made to avoid project delays.

In many ways, this approach is about actively engaging decision makers in the project as we incorporate decisions into our project plan, we need to consider who truly owns each decision and who needs to be involved in making it. This inclusion also allows us to consider the decision makers role in the project. So are they a project sponsor or part of the project team, or are they a member of your organizational leadership who has limited engagement with the project. When we incorporate decision makers into our project plan, they become stakeholders, which makes it easier for us to plan their level of engagement and how we'll communicate with them throughout the project. They aren't an afterthought. They're a key stakeholder, which leads me to my second recommendation that we not only add decisions and decision makers to our project plan, but also support decision makers in making decisions in a timely manner. The first question we want to consider is what information or input is needed to make this decision to understand what information is needed by decision maker, we want to consider a couple of questions, does a decision maker need access to certain documents or deliverables to be able to give an approval or make their decision? If so, how will we provide that access beyond the final draft document or deliverable, do they need additional contacts or information to make a decision? If so, how will that additional information be provided? Planning for this early saves time later in the project.

Let's go back to our example plan. You can see we've added some information about the information needed to make a decision for the project approval decision. We're sharing the draft report via email. Many project management tools include approval features that allow you to turn a task into an approval so we're asking our ed to approve the task of phase approval in our project management tool, our last decision, the deliverable sign off is trickier. How do we get a committee, an advisory committee, to approve a beta deliverable?

If decisions aren't yes or no, approve or not approved type of decisions. Perhaps we're deciding between several choices, or we need to provide feedback before a task or deliverable can be completed. We may need to schedule a meeting or provide another way to gather input from our decision maker or decision makers. In these cases, we may need to plan for gathering input to reach a decision. So we may want to schedule a meeting or have some sort of structured discussion to reach a final decision. This type of meeting or structured activity can be added to your project plan and relevant stakeholders invited.

So if we look at our example again, we could add a deliverable feedback meeting as a sub task for the advisory committee with the information they need as a meeting agenda that details the activities that we're going to do to get to a decision. Again, by planning this, early decision makers will know when and how they will need to engage with the project and the decision,

an issue that sometimes comes up with more complex decision making, especially when multiple owners, like a committee are involved, is how do we reach that final decision? So essentially, how do we get to a consensus when we have a group, this could be a whole other session all on its own. But something to consider with consensus is that we're not necessarily looking for unanimous agreement, where every stakeholder involved in the decision agrees 100%

that would be great, but what we're really looking for, what we're talking about is getting to a willingness to move forward. So can we get to a place where all of the decision makers, even if they don't agree that a particular decision is the best one, they do agree that the decision that they're making collectively is the decision that is going to move the project forward again, this type of consensus, this willingness to move forward, may involve planning a meeting, planning a structured activity, planning a discussion. All decisions take time, and we want to give decision makers time to review documents, make the.

Decision. But these types of structured activities to reach a decision often take longer, so this is absolutely time that we want to build into our project plan. And these decision makers are stakeholders. We want to be sure we're planning to engage during our project. So my final recommendation is to consider decision making during your project retrospective. So whether you're beginning a new project or you've implemented my first two recommendations, maybe you're already in the middle of a project where you weren't able to plan for decision making. Regardless, you can still reflect on your project's approach to decisions. So at the end of a project or project phase, when we conduct debriefs or retrospectives, we can incorporate a couple of questions to help us reflect on decision making and improve our future projects. So we can ask which decisions took longer than expected, and why do we think that's so was it because the decision hadn't been incorporated into the project plan that we didn't give folks enough time? Maybe the decision that makers lacked the information they needed. So explore that. Why. We might also ask, Was it clear who had the final say in each decision, and did we involve the right people in decision making? So did we assign the right stakeholder as the decision owner? Should we have included someone else, or were there additional stakeholders that needed to participate in that decision? And finally, did we make the best decisions at the right time. So did we schedule our decisions for the best points in our timeline? But also, did we make good decisions in this project that led to better deliverables and a more successful outcome? So adding some questions about decision making to your project retrospectives is a great way to improve project decision making in future projects. So those are some quick ideas on improving project decision making. If we incorporate project decisions into our project plans as tasks or milestones, prepare our decision makers for how they need to engage during the project providing the information and structure they need to make good decisions. And if we spend some time reflecting at the end of our projects on how we can improve decision making, we can create the decision making clarity that will move our projects forward. Now before I take questions, you might be interested in our project approval form, one of the most important decisions we make is whether to launch a project in the first place, and this Simple Approval Form helps you evaluate project feasibility, alignment and readiness, allowing you to initiate projects with clarity and confidence. This form is available at Yazdani consulting.com resources, because strong projects don't just happen. They are approved with purpose. If you're curious about how our approach to project management helps mission driven leaders bring clarity and calm to complex work, visit Yazdani consulting.com approach to learn more, and because your plan is only as strong as your people. We can work with you to create tools, processes, systems and practices your team needs to execute with clarity and confidence. Great, so I'm happy to take any questions you have about project decision making, please add them in the comments. I'll give folks a few moments to add their questions if I'm not able to answer your question live, I'm happy to respond later in the comments. You can also find all of the ways to contact me at Yazdani consulting.com Contact please reach out to me if you'd like to talk about projects or project decisions.

Okay, so a question is,

I'm worried about assigning an approval task to my director. How do I set expectations without overstepping? So this is really a great question and and I absolutely understand the concern about just, you know, assigning a task to your leadership. And what I would suggest is, you know, once you know what decisions need to be made, when they need to be made, and who the decision maker is, you reach out that reach out to that decision maker, and frame the decision as sort of a strategic safeguard. So you can say something like, you know, there is a point in the project where your input and expect perspective are going to be really critical, and so to respect your time, I'd like to schedule these decision points early so you aren't blindsided by the decision and have ample time to weigh in. And so essentially, we're framing.

This planning about decisions, this sort of assignment of a task as a way to respect their time, and you can confirm with them, does that timing work? Are you giving them enough time? Is that a good time for them? And when you start this conversation, it's also a great opportunity to learn what they would need to make a good decision. And so that way you can add that into your plan, what information you need to have prepared, and then you can let them know when they'll receive that information. All right, great. So feel free to reach out to me with any additional questions, and thank you for participating in our impactful projects and Planning series. Visit Yazdani consulting.com IPP to find out about upcoming sessions and to review recordings of all of the sessions in the series. Thank you.