Decision Making with Criteria and Weight

If you need to make an important decision, the following can help:

  1. Identify the criteria
  2. Identify the weighting of each criteria
  3. Rate your options against the criteria and multiply by the weightings

For example, when I was giving input on hiring our PUM, I identified the following criteria:

  • Microsoft Experience
  • patterns & practices Experience
  • Attract the right talent
  • Execution
  • Customer-connection
  • Engineering Competence
  • Business Competence
  • Political Competence

I then assigned a weighting.  For example:

  • Microsoft Experience - (2)
  • patterns & practices Experience - (3)
  • Attract the right talent - (3)
  • Execution - (3)
  • Customer-connection - (3)
  • Engineering Competence  - (2)
  • Business Competence - (2)
  • Political Competence - (2)

I rated the candidate against each criteria and then multiplied by the weighting.  This gave me a quick frame to compare different candidates as well as have more meaningful dialogues with others.  The actual numbers were less important than testing and clarifying criteria.

Published 06 May 08 08:01 by J.D. Meier
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Comments

# Vijay said on May 6, 2008 4:24 AM:

I guess this is called Pugh matrix

# Jamie Fenton said on May 6, 2008 10:26 AM:

This one is a classic pattern used to do everything from judging beauty contests, to selecting tax returns for auditing, and even for determining the sex of a skeleton found at an archeological dig. Neural networks do it too.

I learned about it in engineering school, where it was called the discriminate function.

So its a classic, but one worth remembering and reteaching.

# J.D. Meier said on May 7, 2008 12:59 AM:

It sounds like this rose has multiple names -- I like the pattern.

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