The Top Three Challenges Stifling Decision-Making Today

An organization’s success is ultimately defined by the decisions that get made. Whether it’s a CEO determining whether to make a strategic acquisition or an individual contributor choosing what to work on during a given day, decisions have consequences.

When decision-making is optimized, teams can speed time to market and minimize delays. Leaders can foster an environment characterized by transparency and clarity, helping all stakeholders have a solid understanding of what needs to be done and why. With effective decision-making, teams can pivot more rapidly and respond more effectively to new challenges and opportunities. But above all, effective decision-making helps ensure the right work is being done at the right time. This promotes consistent alignment with strategic objectives, optimized organizational performance, and maximized value delivery.

However, many leaders confront several stubborn challenges that impede their ability to achieve this decision-making optimization:

• Inadequate insights. Too often, decision-makers are forced to rely on incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate information, or they’re overwhelmed by massive volumes of data that make it too difficult to glean the needed insights. Without concrete intelligence, teams can’t do what-if analyses, perform data-driven analytics, or gauge the ROI of previous decisions. These insufficient data sets don’t just stifle individual decision-making, they prevent the successful use of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
• Misalignment. Within many organizations, decision-makers wrestle with conflicting interests, lack of consensus, and varied visions. This leads to discord, inefficient resource allocation, and suboptimal decisions. Misalignment is exacerbated by conflicting, silo-based goals and incentive models. This all leads to confusion and delays in decision-making, which can result in missed market opportunities and unnecessary costs.
• Reliance on outdated ways of working. In today’s markets, opportunities and challenges present themselves at an increasingly rapid rate. Successful businesses will be those that can pivot most rapidly in response to shifting market realities. Those organizations that fail to embrace Agile and lean thinking will be increasingly ill-equipped to meet these imperatives. It is only through these modern approaches that teams can establish continuous feedback loops, rapid iteration, and a laser focus on customer value.

To counter these challenges, teams need to start by adopting modern, enterprise-level Agile practices. By employing Value Stream Management (VSM), organizations can align operations with value. In addition, to move past the obstacles above, teams must also leverage advanced technologies that deliver the complete, accurate, and timely data that enables data-driven decision-making. These advanced tools provide the foundation that is essential in scaling agile and VSM approaches across an enterprise.

Fundamentally, teams need a VSM solution like ValueOps by Broadcom. ValueOps is an integrated, enterprise-wide solution that fuels improved, data-driven decision-making, value delivery, and agility. With ValueOps, organizations can establish a centralized, real-time data source for all strategic initiatives, while integrating with work management tools. In this way, the solution helps ensure that all data is accurate and accessible.

The Hartford achieves decision-making breakthroughs

The Hartford is a leader in property and casualty insurance, group benefits, and mutual funds. With more than 200 years of expertise, the organization is widely recognized for its service excellence, sustainability practices, trust, and integrity.  

Teams at The Hartford had been pursuing an agile transformation and seeking to align with SAFe for several years and had been tremendously successful in these efforts. However, over time, leaders found they had reached the point in which further progress was limited. IT had taken a traditional approach to planning and work delivery. They structured their work as projects, which inhibited their ability to create permanent teams. Instead, they were investing time and effort into creating and disbanding teams, limiting further productivity improvements.

Leaders at The Hartford decided to implement a VSM approach using ValueOps. Through this approach, teams across the organization were better able to ensure that the right work was being carried out, while also gaining greater insight and transparency into what was happening.

Conclusion

When it comes to enhancing decision-making, the stakes are high. Now, it’s more vital than ever to establish the unified data and advanced capabilities that fuel optimized decision-making in your organization. To learn more, be sure to download our in-depth white paper, Enhance Organizational Decision Making. This paper provides a detailed look at the challenges that hinder decision-makers today, and it outlines the proven strategies that help teams eliminate these obstacles.