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Is Slow Decision Making Delaying Your Projects? June 2023, 2 minute read
What's your Decision Culture?, May 2023, 2 minute read
Decision Making for Project Performance, May 2023, 2 minute read
Why We created Janua, April 2023, 3 minute read
Cloud Migration - Decisions, decisions, decisions!, March 2023, 3 minute read
The Importance of Good Decision Making in Organisations, Feb 2023, 2 minute read

Is your project delayed again? Need a decision made?

Project and portfolio managers face numerous challenges that impede project progress and drain valuable resources, but the one critical factor that always delays projects and causes budget overruns is slow decision making.

Delays become commonplace when decision making processes lack clarity and structure, compromising project success and even threatening failure. Without a structured approach to decision making, valuable time is wasted in endless discussions, unresolved debates, and unnecessary layers of bureaucracy. Frustrated project teams struggle to make progress, leading to decreased morale and productivity.

Janua Decision Flow software provides a structured decision making process that saves time, enhances visibility, reduces delays, and optimizes project spend. When using Janua, project teams eliminate the chaos and time lost surrounding decision making, ensuring that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities through an accountability driven workflow.

Decision stakeholders at all levels are transparently engaged with Janua Decision Flow, and enabled to view and participate in decisions, with easy reminders of what is due when. As for revising and reviewing what was decided, Janua provides an instant record with centralized decision-related information, providing a quick and easy audit trail.

Having an effective decision-making process is the most impactful thing you can do to improve the quality and timeliness of your decisions, leading to project success.  Equip your transformations with Janua Decision Flow  structured decision making and save time, reduce delays, and get better results. By implementing this powerful tool, project and portfolio managers can unlock the potential of efficient decision making and propel their projects towards success.

The clock is ticking…sign-up today and be eligible for Janua’s Decision Making Fundamentals training course valued at $5,000.

By Andrew Hill, Janua Co-founder and COO

What's your Decision Culture?

When it comes to making decisions, most organisations tend to take an ad hoc approach, which can lead to inconsistency, lack of transparency, inefficiency, and increased risk. Ask just about anyone working in a large organisation if their organisation’s decision making process is effective, and the answer is almost always ‘no’.
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It’s a problem hidden in plain sight.
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Having a structured decision making process has benefits:

- Consistency: decisions are made consistently across different departments or teams. This consistency helps to establish clear guidelines and expectations for decision-making, and reduces the likelihood of decision-making bias or errors. 
- Transparency: allows stakeholders to understand how decisions are made, and why certain decisions were reached. This transparency can help to build trust and credibility within the organisation, and can also improve communication and collaboration among team members. 
- Efficiency: streamline decision-making and reduce the time and resources required to make a decision. This efficiency can lead to faster and more effective decision-making, which can help the organisation to stay agile and competitive.
- Risk management: help to mitigate risks associated with decision-making by ensuring that all relevant factors and considerations are taken into account before a decision is made. This can help to minimise the likelihood of making a costly or detrimental decision. 

At Janua we understand that how you make decisions is as important as the decisions you make. Our Decision Flow tool simplifies the process of adopting a structured decision-making process, allowing you to make more consistent and transparent decisions across your organisation, more efficiently and with reduced risk.

By Andrew Hill, Janua Co-founder and COO

Decision Making for Project Performance

Successful portfolio investment outcomes and project delivery are highly dependent on the effectiveness of organisational decision making.  Project and portfolio management require many sound decisions to be made frequently and swiftly.

Yet, despite the plethora of tools to support most aspects of project management many organisations still struggle to deliver consistently, wasting large amounts of investment budgets and valuable resource time.

 
Ineffectual decision making processes lie at the heart of this challenge with decisions taking too long, the right people not being engaged, insufficient analysis, workplace politics and insufficient record keeping. With increasing uncertainty, high risks and complexity, driving decision making accountability and enabling empowerment are fundamental to lifting the game. 

By implementing Janua Decision Flow, along with coaching your tribes in effective decision making, your organisation is better prepared for upcoming challenges, opportunities, and to overcome obstacles. Empowerment is enabled as Janua decision making can be dispersed yet transparent with clear, time driven accountabilities. 

Regular retrospection and adaptation of decisions will help you stay agile and respond to changing conditions or organisational priorities, while providing an efficient record for review. Janua Decision Flow interfaces with some project tools (e.g. Atlassian Jira) increasing the overall investment management capability within your organisation, while leveraging AI to ensure you have your bases covered. 

Increase your organisations project investment successes and improve empowerment with Janua decision making effectiveness. Contact us today at hello@janua.com

‍By Maria Firkin, Janua Advisory Board Member

Why We Created Janua

Have you ever had a project that got delayed because your team couldn't come to a decision on a critical component? Do you ever get the deja vu feeling in meetings where you're discussing the same thing over and over again?

Looking back on my own experience, I decided to write a short post about my experience and why we started Janua.

After the dust settled from integrating our small nimble 12 person team into a 10,000+ person organisation we quickly noticed a big difference with getting things done in projects. Our time was now more consumed by meetings and there were more people involved in even seemingly minor project implementation items.


People were either hiding in committees or demanding to be the decision maker. What should have been a conversation whilst walking to the meeting room (or zoom call opening small talk), ended up being revisited on weekly calls. Over and over.People often see this as an inevitable part of corporate life. I don't think it should be. There are clear business benefits from being able to get the most out of the people you employ to help you achieve your business goals. Not to mention the fact that you're slowly destroying the morale of your team. 

Our mission has come about by these 1,000 paper cuts. Let's not spend our lives in meetings locked in discussion loops. We want to help people break the groupthink cycle and get back to doing important work.

People often ask "how is a software tool going to help teams make decisions?", and at first glance it does seem like it could add more work to a team's already busy schedule. The reality is that adding structure with a decision making framework will unlock a team's ability to deliver projects/outcomes. What Janua does is make that transition to this new way of working more streamlined and provide tools that become your copilot. Sure, you could try to do it with a spreadsheet… but would you run your sales pipeline like that, instead of using a CRM tool?  Why not treat your strategic and key project decisions like that too. 

Progressive organisations  focus seriously on areas of team behaviour and performance. Leaders are taking steps to ensure inclusion and  psychological safety are part of their culture. We believe that we can be part of enabling that and leveraging the power of teams, and the decisions they make, to drive better business outcomes.  

As of the time of writing this, everyone is talking about AI. Either expecting AI to be part of your product/solution, or expecting it to supplant the need for your product/solution. I am optimistic and excited that using AI as part of a proven workflow will be a way we can add value to a truly human experience of making a decision.

This article has not been written by AI. It has been natural for me to write of my personal experience, the team's challenges and how we feel we can have an impact on the way people work.

By Martyn Lomax, Janua Co-founder and CEO
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Congratulations, you’re migrating your IT infrastructure to the cloud. You've just handed 100s of decisions to your IT team.


Selecting a new cloud provider is possibly the easiest choice you will make when it comes to migrating your services from in-house infrastructure, or moving from another provider. But after that, there are many decisions to be made to complete a successful migration and release the benefits of your cloud platform. The fun has just begun!

Many cloud providers provide tools that help you analyse your IT infrastructure aYet there are some things that have to be done in-house. A big migration project will require numerous decisions to be made by the Engineering Team - some big, some small, some trivial, some critical. Some will be made by individual engineers, others by the Engineering Team, while others will require input from the whole organisation. 

Decisions like:
- Selecting workloads for migration and prioritisation
- Selecting new monitoring tools for the new environment
- Deciding on geographic workload distribution to protect against outages (yeah, bad things happen)
- Selecting training courses for engineering staff to gain new required skills
- And the list goes on… 

Most organisations take an ad hoc approach to decision making, usually resulting in: exhausting and repetitive meetings, frustration due to slow progress, incomplete stakeholder engagement, lack of delegation, fear of accountability, no record of the decision criteria and analysis, and so on. The common result - poor decisions made slowly.

Bad decision making can ruin good projects. They cause missed deadlines, poor business outcomes and higher costs. Engineering Teams run the risk of becoming the scapegoat for failures. Having a decision workflow in place can help avoid this.
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Janua Decision Flow is a tool that helps teams make better decisions. Each new decision is added to Janua and team members are assigned roles in the decision making process. Criteria is captured, data is analysed, stakeholders are informed, and a decision is made. All with full visibility of the organisation's leadership team. Endless meetings are avoided and an audit trail of data ensures every decision will stand up to later scrutiny.

As decisions are added a valuable knowledge base grows enabling retrospective reviews and helping to avoid past mistakes. 

Got questions? We’d love to hear from you - hello@janua.com.

The Importance of Good Decision Making in Organizations

Good decision making is crucial for the success of any organization. It allows teams to navigate complex and uncertain situations, to make informed choices that align with their goals and values, and to use their resources effectively. However, making good decisions is not always easy, and organizations need to put in place a number of practices and processes to ensure that they are making the best possible decisions.

One key aspect of good decision making is the use of decision frameworks. These frameworks provide a structured approach for decision making, and can help to ensure that all relevant information is taken into account. By using a decision framework, organizations can make sure that everyone is clear about their role in the decision process, and that the decision is well defined.

Decision delegation empower teams to work quickly and smartly, and avoids unnecessary delays in waiting for decisions from executives. However, with delegation comes risk and responsibility. Having a decision process that gives the management team full decision tracking visibility is highly preferable.

A key decision register is another important tool for good decision making. A key decision register is a record all of the decisions that are made within an organization. It should include information such as the date of the decision, the decision maker, the decision itself, and any follow-up actions.

By keeping a key decision register, organizations can ensure that all decisions are tracked and that a post-mortem review is conducted. Post-mortem reviews provide an opportunity to reflect on what worked well and what didn't. Organizations can learn from their mistakes and make improvements for the future.

In conclusion, good decision making is a powerful tool for driving the success of organizations. Here at Janua, it's our mission to help organizations make better decisions by providing them with a software platform that supports them through every step of the decision process.

By Andrew Hill, Janua Co-founder and COO



Images credit: arrmypicca

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