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Project Decision Making - Firmed Up. |
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Project Decision Making - Firmed Up. Situation: You find yourself asking - What did we decide about that? Decisions made in a structured way often happen in meetings. They get captured in meeting notes and that's great.  Decisions made in reaction to new situations pop up every day. We have a brief email exchange about them and we at least feel like we've made a decision. -- or maybe some of us do. In the end those exchanges just create more loose ends.We recently talked to Chris Bright, from Zapproved about yet another simple, cool PM tool that addresses a critical issue - decision-making. I think his responses to my questions are enough to at least get you thinking about how you handle and document decisions. Q. How do you see Zapproved being used within the context of projects? Is it used more for sign-offs or for every day decision-making? Chris: We have users utilizing Zapproved for consensus building around big milestone approvals involving many participants on down to approval of routine, everyday decision-making between individuals. The feedback we get is that the app is helpful for keeping momentum in organizational processes and for tracking and recording tasks. Since a significant portion of any project is collaborating with others, Zapproved offers a solution that is easy to implement and that “sticks.” For larger groups, Zapproved offers several advantages. As is typical, most decisions are being made via email. That presents problems because one decision can fill up inboxes with long email chains that can be difficult to drive to conclusion. Plus, some people do not participate for reasons of travel or to passively resist the group. Tech blogger Robert Scoble posited that the number of emails required to do something in email is equal to the number of participants squared. That feels about right to me! Zapproved hosts the conversation in a single place online so everyone can see comments and feedback at one time and out in the open. If someone has not responded, it is clear that is the case. By bringing decisions into the daylight it puts pressure on laggards to not block the group and reduces interference of politics and personalities. On more routine tasks of acknowledging status reports and procedural steps, scheduling meetings and calls, approving travel requests, new hires, and other decisions that are plentiful but tend to not get tracked well, our system puts them in a repository and associates them with explicit approvals. This can help keep things moving smoothly since it reduces organizational friction around procedural steps. Q. Could you give us a couple specific examples (from your current organizational clients) of decisions that people manage within Zapproved? Chris: I’ve provided a few examples below of how our users are utilizing the system:
Q. I could see people using Zapproved as a way to track action items that come out of status meetings. Do know of any best practices around that? How is Zapproved used in that situation? Chris: Yes, I have spoken with a few people who use it for task management in the way you are describing. After a status meeting, the project manager sends task notifications to the appropriate people that scopes the task and provides a deadline. Once the person completes the task, they can “Approve” it to signal that state or “Deny” it if, for some reason, it was not done or no longer needed to be done. Q. You talked a bit about how Zapproved changes the behavior of people whose it, versus those who use email threads to document decisions. Could you describe those differences in terms of approach, wording, and structure? Chris: Yes, once people start using the system there are subtle shifts in behavior that managers find helpful. When someone is submitting a proposal they know that at the bottom of the message it says “Approve” and “Deny.” Email tends to have a casual tone so people are reluctant to write in an actionable way, i.e. citing outcomes and deadlines, because it comes across as awkward. We see emails ending with phrases like “let me know what you think” and other casual, polite words. Not the best approach when driving something to closure. In Zapproved the context of the system compels users to write in an actionable way. That simple shift helps enormously because it drives explicit statements such as “I am seeking your approval on this item.” As a manager, the amount of energy required to respond is reduced dramatically. We hear time and time again of how group productivity increases by providing a simple framework for process in teams. Q. Which types of decisions are best left out of Zapproved? Chris: Most decisions adapt well in Zapproved especially when transparency and an audit trail are key. Even though approvals in Zapproved are legally binding, one may want to check with an attorney before using it as the final sign-off on a multi-million contract. We are working on e-signatures that would add higher levels of redundancy on identity, so we hope that we will be able to fulfill even that role in the future! Q. How do you deal with decision-tree sorts of situations where decisions are linked to one another? Chris: At this time, that is an ad hoc situation that teams organize as needed. One of our users has built an e-procurement system on Zapproved with hierarchical workflows and it works well. It saves on paper and the alternative of an expensive, complex tool would have absorbed much more energy and resources. However, we are planning to build that functionality into Zapproved in a way that is easy and intuitive to implement. Q. How do you filter out the smaller decisions from the larger ones? Can you tag them with project or category names? Chris: Every proposal has a “Project” field that can be defined by the user. Once a person has entered text in that field, it is stored and is available in a drop-down menu for any future proposals. This helps group and track decisions around a single project (i.e. “NASA Hydrogen Propellant Proposal”), or can also substitute for flagging more routine processes such as “Vacation Requests.” It is an easy way to put proposals in various buckets that makes sense for a team. Q. What’s at the top of the list for future enhancements? Chris: Our development paths are focused on adding functionality and increasing integration. As I mentioned, we are working on creating decision-tree workflows, embedded forms and even e-signatures. Looking at integration, we see Zapproved as a strong complement to other tools. Last month we introduced an add-in for Outlook and we want to expand access to Zapproved through other business applications as well as mobile platforms.
| Posted: April 27, 2009 02:53 PM |
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