Which IT decision comes first?
IT decisions reach an executive team one at a time. A tender, a hire, a budget, an outage, a provider that is not delivering. Each one has a sender and a deadline. None of them comes with a place in a sequence. So in practice, the loudest voice or the calendar decides.
That is no criticism of the senders. Each of them sees their own question, and each question is legitimate. What is missing is an overview that puts the questions in relation to each other. Without it, the third most important decision occasionally gets made first because it was due first.
In that overview there are three kinds of decisions. Those that come first, because others depend on them or a deadline forces them. Those that can wait, because the domain behind them runs stably and carries little change. And those that cannot be made today, because something is missing: a number, a contract end date, a role that does not yet exist.
A decision that cannot be made today is information you can work with.
A sequence that can get expensive
A typical sequence, simplified: a tender is prepared, with requirements, evaluation logic and a timeline, before anyone has decided who will manage the new provider afterwards. The contract is awarded. Managing the provider lands on a role that owns neither the contract nor the budget. Eighteen months later, friction with the provider is on the executive agenda, and it looks like a provider problem. Part of it was a sequencing problem.
The decision about who manages the provider belonged before the tender. It could have been made. It just never appeared anywhere as the first one.
What creates the sequence
Three facts about each decision are usually enough to place it: who makes it, what happens if nothing happens by a given date, and what is missing if it cannot be made today. Decisions with a dependency or a hard deadline move up. Decisions with a stable domain behind them move down. Decisions without an owner become visible for what they are: unassigned responsibilities.
The ones that cannot be made today deserve a page of their own: for each, what is missing, who has it, and how to get it. That page is a work order, and it is the page that goes missing most often, because nobody likes writing down what they do not know yet.
An exercise for your desk
Take the three IT decisions sitting with you right now. For each one, write a single line: who decides, what is missing, and what happens without a decision by the end of the quarter. The line you cannot fill in shows where clarification is needed first. How urgent that clarification is depends, like any other decision, on impact, timing and dependencies.
Which of your open IT decisions is really one that cannot be made today?
Mathies Wähner · Interim Lead · IT Governance & Program Stabilization. New notes appear on LinkedIn first. Follow there →