Make Better Decisions, Faster!

Making Better Decisions that count!

The cycle starts with being told what the objectives of the business are! Simple you say... not so!  Enabling the right people to understand which objectives they can effect, which they can't, how much they can affect them, and the best time to affect them is harder than you think!

Alignment, alignment, alignment enables organisations to respond fast, and of course, those that do will outperform their competitors.  They will also drive massive benefits in cost savings. The InPhase Apps stop people, projects, programmes and suppliers from even starting unaligned activity.
 
Can you say 100% of your business activity from 100% of your staff adds value to your top level objectives? Unlike corporate performance systems, InPhase is designed to help everyone in the business including your front line mangers, embedding alignment for all.
 
Professor Gary Marcus of New York University provides a range of quick techniques based on psychological research to help everyone improve decision-making... and InPhase can help you embed these in your business.
 
Consider alternative plans of action: this can include reviewing past activity, what has worked, what has not worked, reviewing other people's ideas and innovative ways to move the business forward, capture ideas that might be used later if the current action plans don’t work
 
Reframe the question
Using InPhase as a single collaboration environment enables you to see multiple points of view around the same management issue.  It also brings ALL the information into a single place so that as a problem or proposed project is considered we can view cost implications, risks, other projects being undertaken and resources all in a single place. This avoids the silo mentality and decisions based on a few just metric based criteria.
 
Correlation doesn't equal causation
This is actually at the heart of why Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence must sit side by side. Business Intelligence is excellent at identifying correlation, but just because there is a statistical relationship between one thing and another there does NOT mean there must be causation! Subjective information, capturing actions to outcomes alongside the correlation is essential to stop mistaken inferences being made time and time again.
 
Never quite trust the data
Data can highlight many things, including making freak occurrences look inevitable. Nothing replaces all the years of experience that your employees collectively contribute. Make sure your data is in the context of your business and your desired outcomes.
 
Reduce best guess behaviour
Use fact, experience, benchmarking and proven techniques embedded into the business to overcome mangers' best guess and impulsive decision making!
 
Make activity meaningful
Humans are better at concrete goals; translate the perceived abstract strategic goals like ‘make more money’ or 'have happier customers' into tangible goals, or they will get lost in the mix. Cascade these into real actions like ‘initiate a customer care hotline’ or ‘automate the contract signing procedure to increase ease of purchase’.
 
Weigh costs against benefits
Common advice but notoriously tricky to do in practice... until now! InPhase comes with built in value for money indexing so that you can see continuous performance to outcomes ratios. Scenario planning and considering your programs in the context of others also enables users to see anticipated benefits to cost ratios across the business.
 
Imagine your decision will be spot-checked
When we think someone will check up on us we make more cognitive effort, leading to better decision-making. InPhase makes all decisions and actions transparent to all. Many of our customers report that this approach breeds a dramatically improved culture of openness and willingness to give new ideas a go.
 
Consider future impacts
Help distance yourself by thinking about how decisions taken today will affect you in the future. InPhase users always consider the impacts of their actions, the benefits they will bring and in what time frame.
 
All decisions are not equal
Some decisions are more important than others. Not all decisions warrant effortful deliberation: sometimes it's better just to choose and be done with it. The trick is knowing which is which - experience captured in the solution helps your mangers to know what works and what doesn't work, very quickly and easily.
 
What helps your mangers make better decisions?