Need To Make A Decision, Use A Scoring System.

 

When it comes to making a decision, most people look at it as a yes or no proposition.  You do it or you don't do it but others look at a decision being a choice of several possibilities, much as businesses approach a decision. When the decision is difficult, we often list and rank our alternatives to determine which is better.

The process of using a scoring system involves identifying the outcome, determining the criteria, assigning a weight to each based on importance, developing the actual scoring system, evaluating, totaling the score, analyzing and making a decision.  Although this is the normal system used, it is sometimes flawed.

Often decisions come out of a limited number of choices. If the decision is based on one criteria such as cost, then it becomes much easier but if there are more possibilities, then it involves the pros and cons for each one. This means there is a multi-criteria choice involved.

Most of the weighted systems used to make the decision. This process requires the decision maker to eliminate those options which are a no go before ranking the remaining ones according to preference and assigned a score based on each criteria. The scores usually range from 1 to 5 or some similar ranking for each possibility, then multiplied by a weight, and the scores are totaled to find an overall score.  

Unfortunately, the weakness with this the when it comes to assigning the value because the value is based upon the human evaluation. The better approach. is to consider using a scoring system that contains negative numbers with an adjustment to keep the values between 0 and 10. The actual formula is 

                                    weighted score = (score – offset) × weight + scale_shift.

Offset refers to the midpoint of the score range and scale shift is the smallest number needed to make all values positive. Thus if the values are 0 to 10, then the offset and scale shifts are 5 and 50. 

This method still sees those that have the lowest numbers are not the best choice but what this alternate system does is that a low score does not immediately put it at a disadvantage whereas the normal system does. It was originally developed to use in engineering.

In the normal selection process, it is possible to get have several possibilities end up with a zero regardless of their importance and depending on whether they are along the left side or the bottom, determines whether they are zero regardless of importance or the choices are penalized against unimportant criteria.  In the alternative system, unimportant scores are neither good nor bad. 

This is just another way of looking at weighting choices. Although it originated in engineering, it is a methods that could easily be using in other places such as businesses.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.