I hear you. In IT we have a host of decisions to make: what software or hardware to buy, which consultant to choose, which hosting company to use, etc. How do you make these decisions? And more importantly, how do you explain them to senior management?
One of the methods I learned from an internship in graduate school is the values clarification exercise. Taking a sheet of paper (or spreadsheet), list the factors down the left side that are important to you and your organization. Try to get as many factors as you can think of. 15 seems to be a good number. Then rate each factor of how important it is for you, use High, Medium, Low or 1-5, where 5 is highest. Then list your options across the top.
When you've heard the presentations and gathered info on each, indicate in the columns on the same 1-5 scale how well each option meets the factors. This is a judgement call, but if you have a few members of your team do the exercise, you can usually correct for biases.
Now it's time to do the math. Multiply each rating by the 1-5 importance factor. So if a factor is a high 5 in importance and option 1 rated a 5 in meeting this factor, the score for that cell would be 5x5 or 25. This is a weighted score, weighted by importance.
Now sum up the weighted score columns to get a bottom line score for each option. Some of the choices may be close in score, but 1 or 2 usually bubble to the top. This is a handy way to make and explain decisions. But a caution: it's not fool-proof. Sometimes you need to trust your gut on things, and gut develops with time and experience.
If you'd like a copy of a sample spreadsheet exercise for this decision matrix approach, see the link below. |