I’m coming into my 3rd year as a Software Quality Assurance Technical Director at a small service company that has a working partnership within a larger, multi-company organization. There are a lot of politics involved, and I have multiple levels of other leadership and direct reports with which I interact. I have my own boss that I report to, the program manager of the larger organization that I also report to informally, two other Directors of different aspects of software development that I work with (each leaders in their own organizations), and twenty-three direct reports.

I’ve been trying to better understand the cause-effect relationships between decisions across all of those relationships, and wanted to develop a kind of framework that was easy to remember so that I could be a better communicator, leader, and decision-maker. 

I’m going to use this medium to talk about that, and probably a bunch of other stuff.

For now, I’ll start off by saying that I’ve come to understand that it’s all just one big system and it all comes down to decisions.

The trajectory of the system is the cumulative expression of decisions.

Onward.

Tristan