Few successful businesses are built by people afraid to make decisions. It's often said that it is better to make a bad decision than to not make a decision at all. But is that really true? Surely there is a fine line between being decisive and just randomly choosing a wine because you like the design of the label or booking a flight because you like the person behind the checkin desk?
Sure, you can't just go shooting from the hip all the time and expect that your ultra-decisive, sharp, go get 'em business will leap ahead of its competitors. But conversely don't expect that indecision will have no impact on your efficiency and profitability.
It's easy to find risk - there's risk crossing the road, risk sending your kids to that local comprehensive, risk getting up in the morning. But we need to be able to use our experience and expertise to assess the risk without explicitly mitigating everything. Crossing the road is a good example - you wouldn't look for a pelican crossing every time you cross - you naturally assess the risk and take it where appropriate. And actually, there's sod all you can do about it when Terry comes round the corner in his GTI, loses it and skids sideways into you - that's just life.
So lets look at a real life example - we're considering adding a featureset to a product. The ROI is attractive, the business are happy with the estimate and what happens? We start asking questions .. we start looking for risk, we start considering other options, under the cover of 'due diligence' we pour effort into ratifying what our experience and gut has been telling us for weeks.
In short, we dither. And miss the opportunity to be decisive, to prove to our customer that we know what we're doing, to demonstrate value quickly.
We certainly become well versed in all the options, their costs and the potential pitfalls of our approach. But when's the last time you were attracted to a know-it-all? More to the point, when's the last time you gave one part of your IT budget and said 'get on with it' ?
Marc Pinder - Delivering IT Application Services for a healthcare and insurance company. And putting the world to rights right here.
