Am I a Decision Maker or Decision Breaker?

Am I a Decision Maker or Decision Breaker?

I find myself challenged more each day since moving out of software development as my full-time gig. It’s a different space on so many levels, and I have a long way to go to get to the point I believe I need to be at, to fully operate in the space of People Person.

I covered People last week. As a People Person (because Human Resources is so, urgh…), I want to be able to engage more with everyone, understand where you come from and where you want to go.

We know that people will move away from Global Kinetic at some point. I moved a lot in my early days as a Developer. It was how I learnt, and grew as a person, and as part of each business I was involved with.
A cog in the works, if you will.

Quite often, we were completely thrown into the deep end and the only way out was to do the seemingly impossible.

How?

Speaking (yes, using our voices),
taking time to prove something ‘off-book’ to present as a better option, making a call,
and sometimes, simply by failing at the task at hand and having to start
again.

Historically, the bigger development jobs were Enterprise clients. Huge teams, big systems, countless integration points, and usually at least one really pushy boss-type person who was applying all manner of threats and pressures. 

Nowadays, many developers have never taken a product from concept to production in that type of environment.

Not everyone has been exposed to the disciplines, including the
bureaucracy, of deploying to shared environments, where downtime is not an option,
where data-sources are shared by other systems,
where your software gets the blame because it is the face of an error thrown elsewhere,
or worse; where we break other systems because of something we miss.

Development in the last 10 years has become more web and mobile device focussed, and there are countless products and solutions where there isn’t a large multi-tier system in play.

Even here at Global Kinetic, our projects vary from very strictly-managed, to ones where the client has given us near free reign with how we design the solution(‘with great power comes great responsibility’).

• • For some, we manage builds, rollouts, app store submissions, and even production servers.

• For others, the development is done by our teams, and then handed over the fence to a configuration team who handle the builds, environments and production rollouts.

All the way back to the top again.
Am I a Decision Maker or Decision Breaker?

 Apparently, I like history lessons as a way forward. I’ll work on that 🙂

 All these differences boil down to how each person interprets the situation, and the plans and decisions made therein.

 A decision maker will use the resources and information at hand and take a decisive route when dealing with a problem at hand. They will trust themselves. They should trust their team.

A decision breaker, will sit quietly, rather doing nothing, or worse, carrying on down a path they know to be wrong, until someone else makes that decision for them, often too late.

 Here’s the rub. You may be wrong anyway!

But if we all stand up and do what we are trained to do, trust each other’s
abilities; we can only end up creating more successful solutions.

Do you know what each person in your team does?
Do you understand where your work fits into their world?
Do you question each other in an honest way?
Do you trust your teammates? Can they Trust You?
What dependencies and impediments exist?
Do you know what the bigger picture is around your project?

Where it fits into the Client’s world?
Where the client fits into our world?

 If we learn what is required of us in our roles, we are then able to make the decisions needed to best deliver on what is expected of us, and probably more!

 So, next time you are uncomfortable with something:

challenge yourself to get it right
trust the decisions of others
get the right result as a team.

 Ross Pickford – Global Kinetic