More Effective Use of Meetings more »
- Powerful facilitation tool – a facilitator controls DecisionPad and provides a framework for the discussion.
Gather everyone’s input, converge on a consensus, and document the result.
- Saves time in meetings – regardless of the personalities and pet issues of the participants. When someone has
an aspect of the decision they’re passionate about, it can be added to the worksheet for consideration.
There’s no need to keep revisiting it as it’s been captured for the overall decision.
- Remembers where you left off – DecisionPad captures the issues, assessments, and data brought to a meeting.
When the team returns for more discussion, they can immediately move forward with new issues.
- Gather input before having a meeting – the facilitator can pull together a decision model with much of the
information ahead of time by interviews and web balloting, so when people gather face-to-face their time is used effectively.
- Have a Virtual Meeting – Combine DecisionPad with your favorite remote screen viewer and video conferencing
setup. You can use the web opinion balloting to take inputs during the meeting if you wish.
- Intuitive user interface – DecisionPad is designed to allow you to start working without training;
meeting participants can immediately comprehend and use DecisionPad to evaluate options. It’s transparent,
allowing full access to the effects of changes. There are also a number of enhancements that will allow you to accurately
document and assess all the nuances of a decision process.
Get Through the Process Quickly & With Confidence more »
- The DecisionPad JumpStart Wizard lets you dive right in, with suggestions and step-by-step guidance through your first decision.
- Your decision worksheet and reports will be automatically generated from your inputs to give to management for final approval.
- Stimulate complete discussion of all decision factors. The worksheet makes it easy to try “what if?” situations with it,
such as what happens when you tweak a rating or weight. You can easily add or modify alternatives or criteria as the collaborators
deepen their understanding -- everything updates immediately to include the changes.
- Combat decision fatigue and analysis-paralysis. People get worn out arguing over things, and become either afraid to make the wrong choices or impatient
to just do something, anything. DecisionPad lets you focus on the relevant issues with the confidence you’ll be able to
justify and document the team’s decision.
- Facts and Opinions handled together. No need to worry that people are making a decision because of the color of the product or
the charm of the sales person. Only relevant subjective criteria are collected, broken out by as many specific aspects as you want.
Facts are entered as hard data. Both are crunched by DecisionPad and weighted as your organization finds appropriate.
This reduces the possibility of emotional or impulsive decision-making.
- Reduce risk by getting everything out in the open before implementation, and by having a record of all the issues
considered for people and organizations to review who were not part of the decision process.
Improve Organizational Communication more »
- Clear, easy-to use worksheets and reports allow you to explain the decision or recommendation, without wasting time explaining
the methodology. This can speed approvals. The worksheet and reports are intuitive and easily understood by the non-technical members
of your team.
- Create buy-in to the decision. Everyone involved can see the reason for the final outcome, and can see that their concerns
were addressed along with all the other factors.
- Confidence in the quality of the decision across the organization will, of itself, improve the probability of success.
- Interview tool – a consultant or internal analyst can sit with people involved in the decision and use it as a tool
to focus the discussion on their needs.
Stop Wasting Time Discussing Things That Don’t Matter more »
- Sensitivity Analysis is a fancy term for “if it won’t affect the decision let’s not waste time talking about it.”
For example when Sam in Sales thinks the ability to easily track prospects is the most important consideration for the new
contact management tool but Fred in Finance thinks the price is most important, you can check DecisionPad’s spark graphs
to instantly show whether either affects the final outcome. If not, no lengthy discussion needed.
- Unknown elements are handled. You can have a worksheet that’s half full of question marks – information you don’t have yet.
DecisionPad will show you when there’s still a range of possible winners. As soon as you’ve collected enough information to nudge
one out ahead of the pack, you can stop sending emails and phone calls to vendors or waiting for that last appendix to your RFP.
- Reduce analysis-paralysis by forcing clarity. Once the issues are identified and visible people become willing to move ahead.
Delay in itself can often be a serious risk.
Document Your Decisions more »
The worksheet and reports fully document the decision and the justifications for it. This is helpful for:
- Demonstrating compliance with applicable statutes and regulations – and if vendors need to be shown the worksheet,
you can use a coded “alias” for the other competitors
- Remembering why the decision was made as it was
- Preventing needing to re-evaluate all the same information next year
- Reducing ongoing discussions second-guessing the decision made
- Starting the next decision process, as in when a contract is up for reevaluation
- Tracking your organizational priorities across decisions and making consistent choices
Borrow the structure for a previous decision as the starting point for a similar one; it’s easily adapted where needed.
No need to start from scratch, even when the people involved are different.
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If you want to show a vendor or employee how they were rated without revealing confidential
information about others, select the alias option for a report or matrix. The names will be replaced
by unique codes assigned by DecisionPad when the alternative was created.
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The arrows indicate which cells, for the specified weights and values, have the greatest positive or negative impact on
the decision ranking for that alternative. DecisionPad scans all the cells, plots the distribution internally and
marks the third with the biggest influence -- one more tool to avoid wasting time on the inconsequential.
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Simply select the criteria you want particular people to evaluate, and DecisionPad will prepare ballots
like this to be accessed by participants for sending input. Participants log into a secure cloud site with any web browser
to make their own entries, which could be in preparation for a meeting or perhaps during one.
Shown here is a criteria weight setting ballot, set by dragging the sliders back and forth.
Evaluators can sort the items and adjust to get the order and profile right. They can attach
notes to values if you enabled that option.
Explanatory notes that you have attached to alternatives, criteria and scales can be available
to the participants, along with overall notes on the decision process and objectives. The documentation
you would would create for the files serves double duty to inform collaborators. Participants, in turn,
can add notes on their entries.
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DecisionPad will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a product evaluation matrix. The analysis math
behind the scenes is sophisticated, but the presentation is approachable to encourage participation and understanding.
No advanced degrees required to make effective use of this powerful business analytical tool.
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When there are multiple evaluators participating in the decision you can quickly send initial invitations, then
monitor their web balloting and send reminders when deadlines approach.
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The JumpStart wizard can be a great tool for developing the first draft of a decision matrix.
You first pick from the typical categories of decisions like purchasing or employee rating so JumpStart
can make meaningful suggestions. Next it steps you through ideas for criteria like a good brainstorming
session facilitator, then it guides you through the rest of the matrix setup.
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Scales are how you express how valuable a given criteria or rating is for you on this decision. It is the
mechanism for getting the "apples and oranges" of most decisions mapped onto a common
scoring system for evaluation.
Sixteen built-in scales handle the common cases like excellence or a high-best number. However it is
easy to add custom scales so you can express the ratings in terms specific to the decision, an improvement
over generic scales when communicating with others. Here we added a pages-per-minute (PPM) number scale
and an ease-of-use word scale.
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When stakeholder groups with distinct needs must share a common decision, it is a big
help to make their views explicitly visible. Areas of agreement will appear that can quickly be
acknowledged so the time can be productively spent exploring any mismatches. Clear visibility can
sometimes inspire a new alternative that satisfies all. At other times a compromise
may become apparent that everyone can buy into.
In any case collaboration can deal with the same specific relevant criteria rather than personalities.
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Scientists have learned that the human brain can handle about 7 items at one time. It's how we are wired. More items causes us
to lose track. Since a complex decision usually has a dozen or more criteria and/or alternatives, this human
limitation really complicates meetings because each person is trying to cope with overload in their own way,
while trying to communicate with other overloaded people.
It is essential to divide-and-conquer the problem in an orderly shared way.
DecisionPad has a flexible outline structure to group and nest criteria;
it is easy to keep every group at or under the "7 item attention span" limit. Thus when the meeting
is setting criteria weights you do it together for a handful of logically related items. When you are done with one group
the matrix keeps the result while you move on to the next grouping, so nothing is lost, minimizing rehashing.
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The utility of something is not always a straight-line relationship to the numbers. This shows an example of risk aversion, where
a dollar of profit is a lot more valuable than a dollar of loss because of the risks undertaking a large investment.
At other times the best utility is in the middle of a range, like Goldilocks’ porridge, so you want the scale
to show high scores in the middle and lower at the extremes.
DecisionPad's custom scales make it easy to say exactly what you mean.
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The outline view makes it easy to organize and edit the elements of the decision. You can double-click to
edit an item or drag with the mouse to change the order.
If you select a cell in the matrix, the square markers get colored outlines for the cell's components, like the
criterion, scale and alternative here. Or if you select an alternative or criterion a large matrix it will scroll
that one into view.
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The pairs weighting option presents criteria two at time to set their relative importance, an easy way to
develop a set of weights -- especially in a meeting. Once DecisionPad has enough pairs it can assemble the
complete weight set for review and fine tuning.
Pairs can also be used for subjective ratings between alternatives within a criterion.
In DecisionPad, paired settings are one of several options for setting weights and ratings, unlike
programs where paired settings are the only method. Each of the DecisionPad methods has its fans
and uses; it's your choice.
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You can create report or matrix views as needed to make specific points to aid collaboration,
approval or documentation.
- Graphical reports are available for the Scores, Values and Weights you are utilizing in your project
- Notes Report shows the ones you select, conveniently organized into outline tree order
- Weight Sensitivity Report automatically moves each weight over a range and shows what effect that would have
on the top 3 rankings, in tabular and spark graph form
- Experiments Report lets you establish a baseline and then collect snapshots of the scoring as you make
what-if changes, with automatic tracking of what the changes were along the way
- Scatterplots can show the scored values of pairs of evaluators, criteria or total scores to look for win-win
alternatives or new possible combinations
- Individual Alternatives Report shows the ranking, rating and notes (selectable) for each alternative,
such as employee or vendor ratings
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By plotting the scores of alternatives for one stakeholder or evaluator versus another, it is easier
to visualize potential compromises. In this example the alternative marked by the plus sign is
slightly better than one square for the legal department, but for Finance the square is the clear
best choice. The square pushes out to the upper-left, an indication that it would be a fine compromise.
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This is the result of screening resumes, a list of score bar graphs in ranked order. The narrow bars have complete
information, hence a single scored value. The wider bars have a question mark unresolved from the resume, so what is
shown is the range of possible scores given all the other information available. Since we were looking for the best
half-dozen for interviews we could see by the overlaps who the potential winner might be.
The red bars were disqualified by a "must-have" value. Since we had enough candidates
we could ignore them, but we could instead reconsider the requirement if someone popped up as a potential
winner otherwise.
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A big time-saver is the ability to leave one or more question marks in the matrix in case the decision can be
made without resolving them. DecisionPad shows the range of possible scores given the rest of
what you know. If the bars do not overlap the best one, then the questions are not worth the research effort or
discussion time to resolve them.
In this score graph, the second alternative's score range does not overlap the first alternative so it
cannot win regardless of how the question is settled. On the other hand, the third alternative could
be a bit better which might be worth resolving (depending on how much that "bit" is worth to you).
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Notes can be attached to alternatives, criteria, scales or evaluators to define them. Notes can also be
attached to weights and ratings in the matrix for commentary on sources or discussion points.
Overall notes let you explain the decision objectives or identify who was involved. The little
note symbol on a matrix cell lets you know where notes are attached.
By keeping notes along the way, an issue need only be brought up and discussed once instead of being
revisited in meeting after meeting.
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The default weighting method is to use percentages with 0-to-10 scores, a natural approach that suits many situations.
However your organization may have a scoring or points system that everyone is used to -- if so use it!
One less thing to explain.
All of the methods are mathematically equivalent and will produce the same ranking, but one may appeal to
your audience more than another.
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Generally the weights are the most controversial aspects of a decision. Weights specify the relative importance of
the criteria. Even after a consensus is reached the natural question remains "what if that one changes",
a common way for approval processes to get derailed.
You can change weights by hand to see what happens, but the Weight Sensitivity report will do it for you
systematically. It adjusts the weight of each criterion over a range and computes the new ranking, presenting the results
in little graphs called sparks like the ones above. The current weight is labeled "At" in the spark.
It shows whether changing the current weight a little will change the ranking, or if a big weight change is required.
This is not the only way to look at the sensitivity but it does provide a quick way to isolate the items worth discussing.
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The sliders set the relative importance or weights between these criteria in a way that anyone can visualize.
Just drag them back and forth. Generally people will set them roughly (or perhaps use the pairwise option first)
then press one of the sort buttons that instantly reorders the criteria. Now they can see whether they are
in the right order of importance with the right profile, and adjust-sort-adjust-etc utill they are.
You can see how this meets the "7 item attention span" issue: you set the weights within each group of
related criteria independently, so the participants need not keep the whole matrix in their heads at once.
This same screen is available to set subjective ratings across alternatives. Even though there may be many more
than 7 alternatives, you can rate them for one criteria at a time and use the sort feature to work in subsets.
Imagine ranking performance on a criterion like handling details or creativiy. You can arrange people who have similar abilities
in a region and then move down the list to pick up a different span. Again the key is getting people's ability
in the right order.
DecisionPad is easy to use, analytically powerful, and gives you the flexibility to collect and
analyze data in ways that work for you. Continue exploring the product at the
More Features page
or compare it to other approaches at Why DecisionPad?
