Multi-objective Decision Analysis; Managing Trade-offs and Uncertainty

Whether managing strategy, operations, or products, making the best decision in a complex uncertain business environment is challenging. One of the major difficulties facing decision makers is that they often have multiple, competing objectives, which means trade-offs will need to be made. To further complicate matters, uncertainty in the business environment makes it hard to explicitly understand how different objectives will impact potential outcomes.

Fortunately, these problems can be solved with a structured framework for multi-objective decision analysis that measures trade-offs among objectives and incorporates uncertainties and risk preferences. This book is designed to help decision makers by providing such an analysis framework implemented as a simple spreadsheet tool. This framework helps structure the decision making process by identifying what information is needed for the decision, defining how that information should be combined and, finally, providing quantifiable evidence to clearly communicate and justify the final decision. With this process, decision making is made more efficient by focusing only on information and factors that are well-defined, measureable, and relevant to the decision at hand. Using this structured decision-making framework, anyone can effectively and consistently make better decisions to gain a competitive and strategic advantage.