A Game Plan for MSP Business Decision-Making
Decisions you make for your MSP business have substantial consequences. They impact the success of your business, customer satisfaction, and shape the career satisfaction of your employees. Weighing the importance of your decision-making can lead to stress and anxiety. To relieve your anxiety and make decisions that result in positive results, make a game plan of different insights, options, and solutions.
Identify the Objective
When it’s time for you to make a decision, the first step is to understand the objective of the decision. Is this a strategic decision you’ll be making that influences the course of your MSP business, such as new services or mergers? Or is it a tactical decision dealing with how things get done, such as handling customer complaints or marketing new products? Once you examine the nature of the decision you need to make, you can move on to gathering the data needed to make an informative decision.
Examine Applicable Information
After determining the objective of the decision, gather any relevant data you need before making your decision. Gather your information from internal, as well as external sources. Internal sources refer to your personal experiences and existing knowledge within the business. External sources relate to any data gathered outside the business, such as surveys, books, consumer reports, and word-of-mouth.
Identify the Options
In any decision-making process, you’ll have several alternatives to examine. Make a list of all your options, using the information you gathered previously and brainstorming the alternatives. Explore different approaches to the decision, developing actionable frameworks for the specific situation for making an effective decision.
Imagine Alternative Scenarios
Once you have a list of decision options, imagine making each of the alternative decisions. Use all the information you gathered and your emotional creativity to create scenarios of each decision. Evaluate the outcome of each option and what would be the result of the decision. As you act out each decision response, you’ll begin to favor one alternative over the others. Once you do this, put each decision in the order you think would work best for your business goals.
Make the Decision
After making your list of decision priorities, it’s time to take action and make a decision according to the circumstances. No matter what the outcome of your decision, be willing to take responsibility for its success or failure.
Prepare for Problems
After making the decision, review the results and consequences. Did your decision resolve the situation? If the result is everything you hoped for, then you’re all set. If the decision didn’t meet your expectations or caused other problems, analyze where you went wrong. Start at the beginning again, gathering more detailed information. Go through your list of alternatives and decide whether another option would have worked out better.
Develop a Team
Developing a decision-making team is very effective because it gives you diverse opinions and skill sets. Team members examine the decision-making process from different angles and perspectives. Your team can brainstorm many more decision alternatives than one person can do. Your team also has a larger network for gathering internal and external information, which provides more insights into the problem.
The team also presents differing scenarios, pointing out the useful points of each decision alternative and its drawbacks. Once a decision is made, the team can evaluate the outcome and suggest other action plans.
If you’re a decision-maker for an MSP business, following these steps can help you organize your thoughts and decision options. Always be prepared with alternative solutions to make strong decisions for your company. Developing a decision-making game plan not only helps you with the decisions you make, but gives you the knowledge to influences and guide your staff to make informative decisions that increase your company’s success.
