In this article I want to explore the aspect of making decisions by IT professionals when doing their work, the importance of these decisions, how they relate to each other and the role played by ethical decisions among them.
As I am always doing in these "Lessons learned", I will extract a few takeaway points I hope would have some value to you as well.
Strategic decisions
What makes a decision strategic? I will say it is the power it holds in shaping the future.
These decisions may be made in different departments of the company by various individuals (CEO, CFO, Business Directors, Practice Managers, Lead Architects) and they may come in different forms - from the products to be launched on the market to the tools and technologies adopted - but they will always determine the future of a company, i.e. if this company will succeed or not in the business,
The CEO of a company running a business for more than 2 decades may see the sales dropping by a significant percentage over a one-year period. He may be concerned about the business and needs to understand - first - why this situation is happening and - secondly - what would be the right decisions to correct it.
The company is building and selling financial software and the CEO has a financial background as well. He is concerned that maybe the software or the process followed internally may be outdated. He decides to engage a consulting company to evaluate both their application and business process and propose a course of action for the future.
The CEO will need to take a few strategic decisions that will affect the success or failure of the company for the next several years.
The PMO Lead running the projects for the consulting company engaged by the CEO needs to make a strategic decision as well, as far as the relationship with this new client is concerned. He needs to keep this relationship going for as long as possible since this new engagement is seen as an important one for his company in terms of potential revenue, number of employees involved in the project, and timeframe for completing the work.
Architectural decisions
The Lead Architect in charge of evaluating the new client's business and development process must propose new directions to follow for the next years. These directions may define a new development process and a new architecture to be implemented, by re-designing the product as well as the network infrastructure.
The architect's decisions are strategic in their own rights.
The Consulting Company may propose a discovery process to take place, a process of analysis and information exchange involving a group of experienced business and development professionals on both sides.
Once the relevant information has been gathered, the Lead Architect conducts a series of internal design sessions involving other professionals from the database, networking and the Cloud departments.
Besides looking for the alternatives that will work best for the future, the Lead Architect wants to deliver a solution that can be implemented over a period of time without disrupting the client's day-to-day business. The client company needs to keep delivering services to their clients while slowly changing their internal process and building a new architecture and infrastructure for their product.
In the architectural world of design patterns, this approach is named the "Strangler Fig" design pattern, proposed by Martin Fowler and more recently by Sam Newman. This metaphor is based on a specie of a Tropical Fig's ability to grow a new tree from a branch that is reaching the ground and it is used to describe a way of doing an evolutionary rewrite of a system while keeping it working.
Among other technical decisions that the architect would propose, the most important one is to deploy the client's application with one of the major Cloud providers in a multi-tenant setup: based on the architect calculations this may save the client company approx. 3 million $ over a 3 years period.
Conflicting interests
As is always the case when working with people, there are several conflicting interests at play.
The CEO does not trust his technical team, he suspects the situation the company is facing is born from poor decisions made over the years.
The Technical Director understands the complexity of the business they have implemented over two decades: he knows the product needs to change, but he would not agree to it if the scarcity of his resources and the constant need to support the existing product would lead to disruption to their clients day to day activity.
The Consulting Company's PMO Lead sees this situation as a great opportunity for financial revenue. He is interested in proposing an effort to re-design the whole product: scrap everything and start over. The difficulty with this approach constitutes the time needed for re-designing 20 years of work and several thousands of user interface screens, a potential effort that will keep the client busy with this project for years to come.
The architect cares about proposing a good technical solution, keeping the business running and saving them money over time while bringing a part of this money back to his company for the services rendered.
In the Project Management Book of Knowledge, one learns about the RACI Matrix: it is a table where various stakeholders on the project are added with a letter assigned to their name: R - Responsible, A - Accountable, C - Consulted, I - Informed.
The CEO and the Consulting Company's PMO Lead are the accountable stakeholders, while the Technical Director and the Lead Architect are the responsible ones if such a matrix would have been drawn.
Ethical decisions
Are there ethical decisions or just decisions that make sense just from a business point of view?
From my experience of work, I will say that more and more you go up on the hierarchy ladder people will answer that there are only business-related decisions and not ethical ones.
But at the same time, I think this is a personal choice that comes from one's education and moral fabric: it is the way you react to everyday facts of life.
What would the Development Director do faced with his own CEO's insistence for a change that could have ended up as a bad experiment?
What would the Lead Architect do faced with his PMO Lead insistence for proposing a "scrap all - start new" solution?
As the RACI matrix is indicating, these 2 people roles allows them to voice their professional opinions internally to their organizations - first - and secondly - deferring to the accountable people for a definitive answer when asked in a broader context.
Regardless of what one needs to hear, the best way to act is to provide your expert opinion about the topic at hand and help analyze the pros and cons, the merit of the solution.
It is important to know as well that some strategic decisions are not under your purview and defer to the right people who need to make them.
Takeaway: Always voice your professional opinion showing the true facts and help construct the best decision.
You have the responsibility that comes with your opinion so don't own other people's mistakes by being pressured in adopting their point of view.
Have all paths been explored, have all the right questions been asked?
As a note to the case presented here, I want to say that one needs to explore many avenues to determine the best course of action he needs to take for his company to be successful.
It is a complex topic to master and in a way it is like trying to guess the number to a lottery ticket: would my market analysis, future technological predictions and other great ideas I have today prove to be the right ones in the years to come?
Besides trying to understand if the product he was building - and the internal process of building it - was at fault, the CEO should have explored if the market demands were still there: was it possible that the markets were saturated with this type of product at the price they were selling it? Were the clients' needs still existing or these needs have shifted towards other emerging alternatives?
Takeaway: Make constant efforts to understand the market directions and be creative in offering services to satisfy your clients' needs.
As a result of the discovery project that lasted for several months in which the CEO participated to all the discovery sessions, he started to gain more trust in his team's ability to deliver good technical solutions. He became more and more reluctant to adopt radical changes that will hinder his company's ability to deliver value for his existing clients; he understood better the amount of work involved, the complexity of the implementation, and ultimately the overall cost.
The CEO's journey on analyzing and understanding the business he was managing was well underway.
Client References
As I have described before, people have different interests, different work ethics and different positions in an organization.
One point of view may win over time, and it may not be yours.
But what I have learned is that your clients will understand if you were dedicated to helping their business or just had a business relationship with them.
When you cared about their business, when you have tried to make the best decisions to fit their needs even though this may be translated into less gain for your own profit, the clients will want to work with you again.
If they cannot do it right away, they will act as business references on your behalf.
This is the trust you want to build with your clients and within your business process.
Takeaway: Stay true to what you believe in, be ethical as this is the long way down to success.
Footnote: Years ago I was in charge of implementing phase 2 of a project my former company was delivering to Bell Canada. The first phase of the project brought Bell on the verge of suing for damages. Following one year and a half of work where I have designed and implemented the change requests received from the client on a monthly basis, the situation changed for the better.
In spite of all of this, Bell never agreed to be a reference to my former employer.
Another lesson learnt the hard way.
“Trust is a fragile thing—hard to earn, easy to lose.” - M.J. Arlidge.
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