Most successful organizations invest regularly in process initiatives that grow their core competencies. The past few years a lot of companies have burnt their budget for such things on six sigma, lean “whatever” or various gate process frameworks. All of these contribute to operational excellence with very little benefit to strategic excellence (see my June 23 post on Strategic vs Operational Excellence).
I believe Decision Management is the single most valuable capability (process core competency) that any organization could invest in to achieve strategic excellence. I’m biased of course, but if you score out a decision management process initiative against any other process investment you could make this year, I believe it would overwhelm its competitors.
Here is the criteria pattern that I recommend that you use when evaluating process initiatives:
Decision Management fills an important gap; most companies have been pursuing operational efficiencies while assuming that strategic excellence could be achieved by hiring or rewarding more “born leaders”. It delivers well against such criteria as process maturity, efficiency and capacity. Decision Management uniquely creates a game-changing capability to leap-frog the competition through its time-to-market and innovation benefits. It creates unique synergies among other process competencies by providing the thinking “glue” that integrates all other future-creating processes and methods.
Think it through. If you’d like to learn more about how to grow a world-class Decision Management capability this year, please contact me.
John Fitch
Filed under: Decision Driven Strategy, Sample Decisions | Tagged: decision pattern, decision management, core competencies, stage-gate, criteria pattern, process improvement, six sigma, process initiatives, process maturity, lean
