The Power of Decentralised Decision-Making in Projects

Imagine you are an engineer working on a new project. You have built a perfect prototype of the solution required; it addresses all the risks and has built-in countermeasures. You know all the nooks and crannies of what you have built, and you have taken inputs from your team and acted on them. Now you have to add the final feature, but it is not within your budget. You’ve successfully built the prototype within the timeline, but now you have to wait to hear back from the product manager on the final decision.

How do you feel? If the word “frustrating” comes to mind, you are right to feel that way. And this is exactly what organisations like Flipkart and Spotify sought to relieve their employees from.

Decentralised Decision-Making

Every decision pending that travels up the hierarchy and back down consumes time, introduces distortion and leads to poor employee trust and ownership. Especially over a portfolio of projects, that signal compounds into a culture where teams stop thinking and only wait.

Decentralised Decision Making answers the structural issue in the problem. Now known as the “Spotify model”, Spotify is one of the few organisations working with this approach, transferring responsibility to Squads, Tribes and Chapters, which are nothing but small, cross-functional teams that own a specific part of a project end-to-end. Here, decisions are taken independently without management control and autonomy is enabled by effective sharing of knowledge and data.

Decentralisation is not equal to disorganisation. To achieve this autonomy and sense of ownership in teams, the Squads have clarity on their goals and have shared accountability through alignment mechanisms at the Tribe level. While authority is pushed down, direction remains at the centre.

The How Part

From the sound of it, the structure looks too good to be true. And it is indeed difficult to bring in a change that challenges years of the traditional structure of organisations. The focus on autonomy proves difficult in industries where some form of hierarchy is necessary to make decisions.

This is where project management frameworks can help bridge that gap. The overtly used but not in its true sense RACI is a powerful tool to bring clarity to decision-making. An accountability matrix, RACI stands for:

Accountability Matrix - R (Responsible), A(Accountable), C(Consulted) and I(Informed)

This matrix lives in every process that involves multiple stakeholders. The person marked accountable is actually empowered to act, not just be a placeholder for confronting failures. With RACI, the escalation paths are defined for genuine exceptions, not as a default route for every significant decision.

In Indian IT services and product organisations, decentralised decision-making is highly relevant. Flipkart exercised the same after providing a structural change that empowered engineers to be the decision-makers on technological choices. When engineers make real decisions, they gain a higher standing in their work and learning curve. The philosophy of granting decision rights to those with the most context is precisely what decentralised decision-making brings forward.

For Indian organisations navigating the tension between hierarchical culture and the speed at which markets demand changes, this is a matter of execution urgency.

Want to understand more about how decentralised decision-making is possible? Join us for a webinar on 13th June!

More details: www.appliedpm.org