How To Make Decisions with DecisionPad 3

Step 1: What are your Options?

What are you choosing between or ranking? Employees for promotion? Vendors or products to purchase? Whatever your decision, the process starts with making a list of options. DecisionPad calls them Alternatives, and they’re the columns of your worksheet.

Step 2: How can you Rate them?

How would you describe or evaluate your alternatives? Would you rate them based on price, quality, support terms? Performance, attitude, skills? The second step of any decision process is to think of the various ways you can break down your opinions or the facts about the alternatives. DecisionPad calls these Criteria, and they’re the rows of your worksheet.

Step 3: What Matters most to you?

Not every criteria is going to be as important as others. If you’re buying a car, you might think price is more important than color (within reason, of course!) You can weight a low price to have more effect on the final outcome than color. DecisionPad calls these settings Weights, and there are a variety of ways to make these choices.

Step 4: Collect Information

Filling in the cells in the worksheet gives DecisionPad the information it needs to rank your alternatives. You can put in facts, like price or test scores. You can also enter opinions, like “great service” or “excellent attitude.” Fill out as much information as you have. DecisionPad will tell you if you have enough info to pick a winner, or if some of the empty cells need to be filled in for confidence in your top choice.

Step 5: Review, and Implement your choice!

Your decision process is almost complete! Take a look at the results. Does anything surprise you? If you thought you knew what the winner was, and something else is on top, did you leave out an important criteria? Maybe you should include “reliability” in those vendor evaluations, to give some weight to the intangible that you know some vendors will deliver to spec on time. Maybe the weights need to be adjusted. It’s not just about getting to the answer you want – playing “what if” with the worksheet will also let you see that you have to make “friendliness” weigh 30 times more than “quality” to get the winner you want – helping bring more objectivity to your decision-making.

After making your final choice, DecisionPad has a set of reports you can use to document your decision. This allows you to jumpstart next-year’s decision, or demonstrate the criteria and information used when the decision needs to be justified. Most importantly, you have the confidence that you’ve used a powerful analytic tool to do objective analysis of all the relevant data, for the strongest choice for your organization.