SpaceX had a problem. Managers at the aerospace manufacturer wanted to make faster decisions for one of their big clients — NASA — by finding alternatives to the high volume of meetings and cumbersome spreadsheets used for tracking projects. Initially, NASA sent a fax (yes, a fax) whenever they had a query, which SpaceX added to a list of outstanding questions. The company then assembled a weekly 50-person meeting to review product status information contained in spreadsheets, addressing each question individually before sending the responses back to NASA.

SpaceX’s dilemma is not an uncommon one. In today’s organizations, the speed of decision making matters, but most are pretty bad at it. One-third of all products are delivered late or incomplete due to an inability or delay in decision-making, according to research from Forrester Consulting and Jama Software. Others at Gartner cite “speed of decision making” as the primary obstacle impacting internal communication. No doubt you’ve been part of a team that waited… and waited… for a higher-up to make a decision before you could resume your work.

These small delays compounded over thousands of decisions soon becomes death by a thousand cuts. According to Forrester, for every hour a product teams spends on heads-down work, they spend 48 minutes waiting on decisions. That equates to more than 3.5 hours of “wait time” in an average eight-hour work day. If a company cuts wait times in half, it can gain more than $370,000 annually in productive time across a 25-person team. This doesn’t even account for the bigger opportunity captured by a company if they can avoid delivering products late to market.

The good news is that companies are finding ways to make better, faster decisions.

SpaceX increased communication in order to speed up their process. Using collaborative technology, NASA now has direct visibility into each project and can identify which SpaceX engineers are working on a specific component. Importantly, they can also start a conversation with these engineers in order to make decisions in real-time. The collaboration system allowed SpaceX to cut its average wait time for defining product requirements by 50% and eliminated the costly weekly four-hour status meeting.

Something similar happened at a large manufacturing firm, which set out to reduce wait times associated with development of its semiconductors. At this company, each product had 250 variations for global distribution, so the complexity quotient was high. Most of the review time was spent in a typical linear process, waiting for one person to make a decision or finish their part before the next person could start work. This approach was incredibly time consuming, requiring three people to drive the review process over a six-month period.

To speed this up, the company implemented advanced collaboration technologies to create review processes that would work in parallel with one another. Rather than waiting for a decision before the next person could begin work, the company brought many people into the process earlier in the cycle so several decisions could be made simultaneously. The collaboration system contained everything related to the product in a central location and used constructs similar to social networking — rather than emails and spreadsheets — to communicate and manage the complexity in real time. This new approach allowed everyone to look beyond their discreet tasks by providing more context about the entire project. As a result, the company fostered more discussions between individuals working on related parts of the product and employees ultimately made faster and better decisions.

These deeper insights also allowed engineers to identify instances where work being done by one team was duplicative or related another team, creating opportunities to reuse core design elements across multiple product lines. It also helped them avoid the need to make many individual, time-consuming decisions in isolation.

The results were dramatic: The global company reduced the review cycle to just one person owning the process, which took a single month. Prior, it took three people and six months, so that’s an 18-fold, or 90% reduction, in time.

This firm and SpaceX, which are clients of Jama Software, both adopted an approach of purposeful collaboration using technology to streamline decision-making. And behind both approaches are a few key tenants that can apply to any company:

Offer a shared vision. Many companies relegate team members to perform specific tasks or only communicate certain components of information to various groups, without providing the big picture. This creates a very limiting, myopic view. SpaceX wanted to provide better communications with NASA so they brought them deeply into the process by sharing decisions as they were being made. By offering everyone on the team — even when it’s thousands of people across different companies – a shared vision, all stakeholders can be in synch and employees can deliver better results.

Encourage more problem solving. Managers should foster an environment where employees seek information to answer questions themselves, rather than sitting back waiting to be assigned their next task. Employees should communicate and collaborate freely with one another, locating experts in certain areas of focus so they can gain insights on their own. When a product designer at the semiconductor company had a question, for example, she knew exactly who was working on the related test case or software specification so she could get her questions answered immediately rather than waiting for information to be sent to her.

Make decisions in parallel. Decisions at organizations are typically made in a linear fashion, but it doesn’t have to be that way. When teams get stuck in the old way of doing things — Decision A first, then Decision B, then Decision C and so on — we create passive teams. In the case of developing and delivering semiconductors, the company enabled multiple teams to simultaneously make decisions related to a product, and insights from one team could help others make faster decisions.

New collaboration systems that engage teams in the decision making process can be effective, even transformative, particularly for companies building complex software and technology products. However, improving decision-making relies on much more than implementing new technologies — it also requires a significant cultural shift. Managers need to let go of the command-and-control approach wherein they only disperse the necessary information to specific teams for fear they may become distracted by additional insights. Rather, they should empower employees by providing them with all the information and trust them to make the right decisions.