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Your success as a manager primarily rests on one single factor. The key factor in your managerial success is the ability to take decisions, quickly and effectively. The fine art and science of decision making will decide how far and fast you will travel in the managerial ladder. The choices you make will have long term impact in your business and career. Decision making is not the ability to take the best guesses and works on strong hunches as some management guru’s make it out. Gut feel and instinctive decision making may sometimes be inspiring and work well but it is best for the professional manager to keep away from this kind of decision making. How does one take decisions? Here is a five point checklist to take better decisions. 1. Information Best decisions are of course made with the availability of quality information. Check whether you have all possible information and data available in the area where a decision is required. But don’t take too much time to gather the information. Sometimes it may help if you take timely decisions with all available information rather than procrastinating on the basis of unavailability of complete information. 2. Defining the outcomes of the decision What are the desired results from the decision? It is best to define the outcomes from the decision making process and take decisions which would best give the desired results. 3. Worst and best case scenario When in doubt better to arrive at the worst case scenario and prepare for the worst case scenario if things go wrong as a result of your decisions. 4. Seek Counsel Sometimes when you agonize over the outcomes of the decisions and unable to take a proper decision it is best to seek counsel from more experienced persons in your organization or industry. It may even be helpful sometimes take the counsel of people totally unrelated to situation. It may even be a friend or your spouse. One would be surprised at the creative solutions such people offer. 5. Take the decision even if undecided Decision making methodologies can be evolved based on the 5 simple tenets outlined above. Time is a key element in the decision process. More opportunities are missed for want of a decision rather than wrong decisions. Keep these factors as a checklist and refer to them whenever you want to take any decision. Remember it is better to be manager who takes some wrong decisions than be a manager who is indecisive and cannot take decisions. As Samuel Johnson said “nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome”. TestKing Offers Best Deal $99. - Offers complete Cert. package in $99 of Mcse2003, Ccnp, Oracle, Citrix, Novell, Checkpoint, Ciw and Sun. My Mathematical Formula 2006. - My Mathematical Formula incorporatingThe Diabolical Staking Plan. Guest post written by Stuart Ngai, Director of Technology Solutions, VERAX
Continued from last Monday. Read Part 1 >> Enforce a checkpoint schedule Now that you’ve worked out a set of goals with your staff. Who’s responsible to make sure things are on track? My experience tells me that it’s both of you: your staff needs to take ownership to keep up with skills and you, as their manager, need to be the measuring stick. And if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. So it needs to be instilled as a routine in order to keep the momentum going. By measuring training progress on a periodic basis like once every 3 to 4 months , you’ll know whether your staff is progressing as expected or perhaps he or she is being overloaded. With such a feedback loop, you’ll be able to fine tune the training plan and keep things in focus. Not one size fits all Everyone’s different. Some of your IT staff might be more comfortable with structured classroom learning while others prefer to be given time and web resources so they can learn at their own pace. And one of the techniques we have done successfully at VERAX is to provide some of the technology savvy staff with resources and allocated time so that they can put together lunch and learn seminars for their peers. And there are many benefits for that: opportunity to showcase what they’ve learned, efficiency in cross training each other, a chance for the team to gel and discuss innovative ideas for your workplace, and virtually no loss of productivity at a minimal cost to the company. It’s been a win-win training mechanism that has been working well for us. So be creative in your approach to training. Make use of web resources With advances in webcasting and e-learning tools, many companies are no longer constrained to sending their staff on expensive offsite training. Virtual training along with virtual machine images would be a great way to learn. And there are tons of resources on the web for that purpose that you should look into (some free resources - Developer Connection, Channel 9) Make it fun Be aware of e-learning trends and listen to your staff for innovative and fun ideas to learn. As an example, one thing we have done is to provide tablets to loan to our staff along with e-book subscriptions so that they can read at their own pace anywhere anytime. Our staff love such innovative approaches to learning and they appreciate our willingness to invest in them. So not only did we generated excitement and high level of staff engagement, we know our staff will be able to learn throughout the year on their own pace instead of the standard one to two weeks training for most companies. So make it fun and engaging. After all, it’s a small investment that pays back many folds. To finish off - You are not alone Just remember that you are not an island on your own. The best way to avoid missteps is to learn from the lessons and best practices of other managers. And guess what? There are already great resources freely available for you, such as the AlignIT portal and LinkedIn group. They are great places where you can read and interact with other IT practitioners for advice. Stuart Ngai
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Stuart Ngai, Director of Technology Solutions at