Master the decision-making process: A successful team's comprehensive guide

The importance of effective decision-making

From projects to planning, making effective decisions takes practice, and sets the foundation for your success. While small, quick decisions may allow some flexibility, big-impact decisions are harder to reverse — so being able to successfully weigh options, risks, and opportunities is a muscle that needs to be flexed and refined.

Regardless of which techniques you choose and how you represent your leadership style, it’s also important to gain buy-in from your whole team and make sure you’ve set up clear processes that you can replicate efficiently in the future.

Decision-making techniques, styles, and approaches

Knowing your decision-making style doesn’t preclude you from making informed decisions. While we all have a level of personal and professional intuition to trust, effective decision-making is backed up by analysis, research, and fact. A PwC survey of senior executives found that data-driven organizations are three times more likely to see improvements in decision-making than those who rely less on data.

There are countless decision-making models that drive informed choices, and finding the right technique comes down to your team makeup and your leadership style. Many teams prefer a SWOT analysis, which outlines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the decision to accurately gauge benefits and risks.

Why is project design important?

Project design ensures the viability and success of a project and helps communicate project value to stakeholders. For example, you can demonstrate to stakeholders what your plans are and set expectations for the entire project. 
Some other benefits of project design include: 

• Ensuring project success: Without taking stock of a project’s potential scope and resources beforehand, you’ll build a project plan in the dark. 
• Minimizing risks: A project design will take into account potential roadblocks. That way, you can figure out ways to circumvent them ahead of time. 
• Maximizing use of resources: With a project design in place, you’ll know what resources are available and how to utilize them better. 

The design phase of a project determines the resources required and ensures efficient resource utilization.

Steps in the project design process

The seven steps in the project design process are important for Agile teams to simplify the Agile project management process and plan how the project will unfold.

For effective project design, teams must follow these seven steps:

Define goals

Project goals should be clear and achievable, never exceeding team members’ abilities. 

Goals should align with the project purpose and business objectives. As a project manager, you should consider whether your project’s goals add value to your company’s products and customers.

The SMART system—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—is a proven method for establishing goals. You can use the template in Confluence to help you. Using the template will allow your team to set specific and measurable goals.

Establish outcomes

Outline the required project outcomes and align them with your project goals. Outcomes should resolve product problems for your users, such as functionality and usability. In short, they should further improve your product. For example, an outcome can be to improve the sales flow of the product. 

It’s important to note that outcomes are not deliverables or work output. Instead, outcomes determine how customers will use deliverables and their value to customers and the company. 

Outlining project outcomes provides a measure of success and a definition of done. From those outcomes, you can better assess their impact.

Identify risks

Risk management is essential to project design. Your job as a project manager is to anticipate problems. You’ll need to look for potential roadblocks, such as development’s current capacity, and determine its impact on the project.

Risks include stretched resources, high costs, or scope creep. For example, once you have identified scope creep as a potential risk, you can mitigate this risk by creating clear project parameters and identifying and adhering to deliverables.

Create a project strategy

The strategy is the foundation of the project plan and ensures the team reaches its goals while adhering to project constraints. You should create the strategy at the same time as the project overview to ensure precision in your execution. 

To create an excellent project strategy, study similar projects and learn from them. This can help unearth common pitfalls, allowing you to plan for them. Once you have identified several potential strategies, consider the pros and cons of each and apply your research to identify the best strategy. This process is part of continuous improvement.

Set a budget

The next step is to create a budget with the information gathered in the previous steps. The project budget will depend on the required project resources. The free budget template in Jira Software is extremely useful for building a project budget. 

Creating a budget helps to reduce the likelihood of cost increases and misallocated resources. Stakeholders appreciate project managers who stick to a budget.

Prepare a contingency plan

It’s important to create a contingency plan for all identified risks. For example, you may need to communicate a change to your customers, especially if the change fundamentally affects the product’s primary function. That kind of change could be a risk where you lose users if you don’t communicate the change to them properly. So, your contingency plan could include onboarding and customer success training, so you’re communicating any changes to customers.

Track deliverables

A well-rounded project design includes details on project deliverables. It’s important to monitor and track the progress of deliverables during the project to ensure the team stays on target, remains within budget, and meets deadlines. 

Jira Software helps project managers track deliverables using Gantt charts or Kanban boards to track project progress.

Decision-making techniques, styles, and approaches

Knowing your decision-making style doesn’t preclude you from making informed decisions. While we all have a level of personal and professional intuition to trust, effective decision-making is backed up by analysis, research, and fact. A PwC survey of senior executives found that data-driven organizations are three times more likely to see improvements in decision-making than those who rely less on data.

There are countless decision-making models that drive informed choices, and finding the right technique comes down to your team makeup and your leadership style. Many teams prefer a SWOT analysis, which outlines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the decision to accurately gauge benefits and risks.

Steps you should take in the decision-making process

The first step you need to take when making a decision is identifying the problem your team needs to solve. Create a Confluence page where you can visualize the problem and who is responsible for overcoming it. Having the problem clearly spelled out will help ensure everyone understands what decision they need to make and why. What is the impact of the problem? What are your goals that will confirm your solution is a success?

Then, break down the issue. Gather information and data that defines what has caused the problem or is preventing a solution. This can include market research, company data, personal insights, and trending news. Build a table that outlines the risks and benefits of potential solutions to prepare your team ahead of time.

Encourage your team to review that outline and provide feedback early on, so they can identify any missing gaps or obstacles before you flesh out the problem. They may also be able to contribute to your research and provide further insights you didn’t consider.

Evaluate your team’s options and use a framework to make a decision. You may need a group effort or further evaluation, which is where your framework comes into play. You may find that the original framework you proposed — like a SWOT analysis – isn’t thorough enough for the solution you’ll need. Encourage your team to propose the right framework that will help with transparency in the decision and will also make their workload clear.

Once you’ve made the decision, work through project management tools like Trello or Jira Work Management to implement it, test it, and monitor it. Continue to document your progress along the way in Confluence so you can refer to it in the future to replicate or iterate your performance.

Popular decision-making frameworks

DACI: Use this framework to work with a team to come to group decisions together, identifying roles within the process including Driver, Approver, Contributors, and Informed individuals. Use data and background knowledge to help support the decision.

Problem framing: Work with your team to identify problem statements that outline one concise solution to the problem in a digestible and collaborative manner. This helps focus on understanding and defining the problem while you align your team on approach. Then you can assemble a select group of stakeholders to settle on the right decision.

Trade-offs: Sometimes making the right decision means making compromises. What will you trade-off for the benefit of the right decision? Work with your team to identify constraints, blockers, and priorities before you kick off the project so you come prepared with decisions before the obstacles happen.

OKRs: Make your decisions with an objective in mind. OKRs are designed for continuous growth and can function as a “north star” that keeps you on course as you make individual decisions during a project.

Decision-making in Confluence

Regardless of which model you pick, your team can work together to both build and document your decision-making framework within Confluence. We have templates for DACI, SWOT analysis, a design decision template, a voting table, and more

Decision-making in Confluence

Regardless of which model you pick, your team can work together to both build and document your decision-making framework within Confluence. We have templates for DACI, SWOT analysis, a design decision template, a voting table, and more