Why Decisions Get Second-Guessed, and What to Do About It

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In this Harvard Business Review article about decision making, authors question why decisions are second guessed and what should we do about it. As a leader you would like your well thought decisions to prevail and work well, not to get questioned or ignored by stakeholders. Should you avoid second-guessing your decisions? How should you do it? Authors have shared three reasons why decisions are second guessed – depending on stakeholder’s response as below

• I was not consulted
• I might have told you before, but here I am, telling you now
• We agreed for something but now I have different plan

For each of above responses, authors have started the way to address their concerns like explaining them the decision making processes, identifying clear roles and responsibilities, setting rules such as silence is agreement, setting a plan of action along with timeline so that there will be no surprise for any of the stakeholders, they will have every opportunity to highlight their concerns right at the beginning.

5 Things that a CIO Should Never Accept in the IT Department

I liked the analogy Jim Anderson has put across to explain the things for which Chief Information Office (CIO) has to do a balancing act. And let me share the quote from the article

“When a chef is at work in a kitchen creating great meals, it’s the ingredients that he or she chooses to use that will have a lasting impact on the quality of the food that they can prepare. As a CIO, you are responsible for creating IT solutions that can power the entire company. You’ll do this using the staff that you have in your IT department. This means that you’ll want to make sure that you don’t have any rotten apples in your kitchen.”

Let’s look at the things that CIO do not want to see or tolerate in his department

• Negativity – remove the baggage of “not possible”, “won’t work here”, “You are new here” and things like that.
• Toxicity – dreadful thinking hampers productivity of others, stop it at any cost
• Dishonesty – The impression of business executives about IT department can be a bad news for you. Avoid any sort of such feeling or your department’s resources who may be contributing to such feeling.
• Boredom – Help them explore new things, kill the boredom learning new things
• Mediocrity – people should strive for better, if they do not – your department will have great challenges

I Want to Use Agile, but My Organization Doesn’t Want To

In this PMHUT article Chris Moody echos concerns shared by many people that they want to go agile but organization is not ready. There could be historic reasons or change management challenges that made organizations think that Agile is not right for them.

Chris has shared few pointers how and where to get started and how to change perspective about agile project management. Let me enlist these points from Chris’ article.

• Start adopting agile practice and agile principles you undertake
• Start using agile solutions but you don’t have to use agile buzzwords or language like scrum, backlog
• Start your own mini scrum board and make it visual for others
• Seek help of other consulting companies, someone else speaking about agile might help
• Join interest groups about agile project management and start contribute to the agile community\

4 Reasons Your Organization Need Project Portfolio Management Software

In this article at projectmanagement.com, I have enlisted the challenges faced by organizations adopting project portfolio management approach such as stakeholder’s interests, resource scarcity and optimal resource allocation, project prioritization, ongoing assessment challenges. I have argued that there are certainly benefits of using project portfolio management softwareif organization has moved up in the value chain to practice project portfolio management. Let me share main reasons to go for project portfolio management software.

• Clear Visibility of Project Portfolio Health at Your Fingertip
• Clear Visibility Means Efficient Resource Management
• Greater Transparency Leads To Greater Trust
• Refined Tracking Cost and Revenue Contributions, Paves Way for Optimization

Let’s me also share other interesting articles and posts that I came across in last week.

Project Management and Ethics Series at ProjectManagement.com

Code of Conduct, Code of Honor: Why You Need an Ethics Policy

Ethics, Professionalism and Manners

Leadership, Strategy Execution and Decision Making

Enhance Strategy Execution by Making Better Decisions

The Two Big Ways Power Transforms a Person

Dealing Transparently with Stakeholders

Why It’s Important To Tell The Truth

How to Manage a Project Like No Other

There is more to read

Internet of Things and Software Industry

Life’s Work: An Interview with Kevin Spacey

Your life can be become easier with the right project management system. ZilicusPM is the right PM tool for you and your team. Get started now.

Additional readings about project management, leadership

• Case Study: What Happens When Project Team Has Dual Reporting
• Avoid These 10 Most Common Mistakes That Leads to Project Failure
• Back2Basics: Ultimate Project Management Guide: Project Planning
• 8 Reasons to Decide Whether Your Organization Needs Project Management Office
• Compare the best project management software 
• All in one project management software
• Guide to selecting best project management software

Do you know ZilicusPM project management software offers comprehensive project planning, project tracking, project collaboration capabilities such as

• Gantt Chart
• Time Tracking
• Budgeting and Cost Management
• Resource Planning and Management
• Issue Tracking
• Risk Management
• Change Management
• Meeting Management
• Stakeholder Management
• Project Portfolio Management
• Project Reporting
• Document Management to help you manage and deliver projects better?

About Zilicus

Zilicus offers the best project portfolio management tool ZilicusPM, with robust project management tools capabilities and easy ways to track project management KPI,

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