Decision Making: A Key Success Factor in Your Cloud Journey
A cloud journey’s success relies on fulfilling the value expectations set by both internal stakeholders and customers.
To achieve this, there needs to be effective decision making throughout the transformation process.
This article examines the importance of timely decisions in cloud adoption – and the challenges associated with that. It also provides actionable principles to improve decision making within your cloud organisation.
By sticking to these principles, you’ll achieve clarity and alignment, accelerate progress, and minimise both friction and delays.
The importance of decision making in the cloud journey
Throughout a cloud journey – or in any transformation programme – decision making is key. By providing your teams with clear guidance and direction, you’ll enable progress and prevent misalignment, resistance and unnecessary hold-ups.
Cloud adoption has a significant impact on every single individual in your team, department and, in some cases, entire organisation. As part of this, tech changes are often the first challenges people tend to think about (“How do I use and manage this new platform?”).
Yet establishing new ways of working, new job roles and potential changes in the organisational structure, can be just as challenging. This is because people are affected on a personal level and might become uncertain about their future in the company.
They might even ask themselves questions like:
- “Is there still a future in this company for me?”
- “Do I really want to be part of this?”
- “Is this a direction I want to follow for my future career?”
- “How will I be able to adapt and learn so many new things? I’m already overloaded.”
These questions don’t have a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. In fact, you can’t answer some of them at all, as they’re down to the individuals themselves. What you can do, though, is provide guidance, give clarity and show direction.
To make conscious, well-informed decisions, people need to know the target they’re aiming for, how they can get there and what you will do to support them.
To make conscious, well-informed decisions, people need to know the target they’re aiming for, how they can get there and what you will do to support them.
Decision making principles
Let’s explore how decision making principles will help you, your coworkers and, ultimately, your whole company to succeed.
1. Don’t waste time - If a decision needs to be made, make it
When team members want guidance or direction, it’s crucial they get it quickly, so they can move forward. If they’re asking, they clearly feel they can’t progress alone and have reached a point where they need help. So your first priority should be allowing them to proceed, by addressing their needs.
Of course, it might not always be possible to come up with a decision right away – but in those instances, be transparent and keep your team updated.
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See how we helped NHS England lay the strategic foundations for scaling cloud across the National Health Service.
2. The Pareto Principle (80-20 rule)
The Pareto Principle (widely known as the 80-20 rule) is one of the most well-known IT principles out there. Essentially, it states that 80% of output can be achieved with 20% of input.
Which also means that achieving the remaining 20% of output will cost you another 80% of input. Or, to put it another way, striving for perfection will cost you a lot of effort …and significantly slow down your progress. Which nobody wants.
That being said, we know there are use cases where anything less than 100% is unacceptable – an airbag, for example, must inflate in every crash, not just 80% of the time – but for the most part, this simply isn’t the case with cloud adoption.
Your entire project won’t fail just because you took a wrong turn at one point, or a decision you made was not ideal. With a few exceptions on technical matters (core networking as an example) most decisions can be easily amended.
Your entire project won’t fail just because you took a wrong turn at one point, or a decision you made was not ideal.
3. Don’t get angry about the past, just learn from your mistakes
Errors happen – we’re human. And decision-makers aren’t immune to that – you’re human too. You will make a ‘wrong’ decision at some point, or at least one that’s not ideal.
After all, you base your decisions on what you know at the time. Then you go on to learn more and have new experiences, so what was once a good decision might then not look so smart. When this happens – and it will happen – don’t waste time on ‘could’ve’ or ‘should’ve’, just learn from it and move on.
In fact, enjoy the fact that you now know better. And don’t apologise – it happens to everybody. Acknowledge what happened, be gracious, then focus on what lies ahead.
4. You can’t be everyone’s darling (sadly)
Some decisions are harder than others – they might impact your team, and might not be what they want. If you’re deciding who should lead your cloud practice, for example, you’re bound to make someone happy and disappoint someone else.
Communicating these decisions isn’t always enjoyable, but it’s essential. Inevitably, not everyone involved will be happy with your decisions, but everybody will appreciate your clarity. Because being clear will mean you can all move forward more quickly.
Inevitably, not everyone involved will be happy with your decisions, but everybody will appreciate your clarity. Because being clear will mean you can all move forward more quickly.
Whereas a lack of clarity or a delayed decision making process will only make everything worse. And this is no basis for progress. It will make you look hesitant, uncommitted, or perhaps even weak. And nobody wants that either.
5. Agility doesn’t stop you from making strategic decisions.
Cloud transformation will change the way your whole company works. In fact, it will change work habits quite drastically as it will introduce a new, company-wide, agile way of operating.
Within this new agile methodology, the focus will be on delivering small but frequent efforts to a product in short cycles. This is about short-term targets, delivered in sprints – and for many this will feel uncomfortable. But this is the baseline for successful sprint planning.
We say baseline because this planning also involves an overarching, strategic goal the team should be working towards. The product owner needs to know what this is, prioritise the backlog and set the sprint goals accordingly.
So this agile methodology comes with lots of flexibility, short release cycles and greatly improved reaction times to changing requirements. But it is still incredibly important to set strategic goals and communicate these to both the product owner and the team.
6. Communication is key
No matter what decision you make, its impact or importance, you need to communicate it in the right way.
Everybody needs to have the same, reliable information at the same time. You might also want to document it somewhere, depending on the topic, so that people can refer back to it later. This is often useful for architectural decisions, as an example.
How our cloud advisory services can help you.
Our Cloud Transformation offering will help you set your cloud adoption journey up for success. We know this because our highly skilled, experienced advisors have worked on hundreds of cloud adoption projects between them.
Which means we have the relevant expertise and experience to guide you through every step, and have resolved all the issues outlined in this post first-hand.
If you have any questions about this article or would like more information about any of our Advisory services, get in touch with Sebastian directly or fill in the form at the bottom of this page.
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