Making hard decisions using decision tables


Let's say you have a problem or a project, which you can solve (or tackle) in several ways. What if success or failure of each solution doesn't have a simple true or false answer? What if each solution has several advantages and disadvantages?

In such cases, it’s not uncommon for a group of experts to gather and discuss the problem for hours and hours and hours. By the time you get to discussing the fourth alternatives pros and cons you're completely lost and have no idea how the fourth's solution relates to the first second and third solutions...

Decision table to the rescue.


Why not use a spreadsheet to build a table with all the alternatives? Each row will relate to a possible solution. Each column will indicate a metric for solution evaluation like cost, time to market. This way, after or during those long hard expert summits, whenever a new solution is suggested, you add a row to your table, and whenever a new advantage or disadvantage of a solution is raised you add it as a column. After the discussion, you complete the table, that is, "compute" a value for each cell in the table.

Presto - now you can see how all the alternatives relate to each other.


If a metric has similar results for all solutions, you can hide the column and ignore it. If a solution(row) has been disqualified due to a FAILURE in one metric, you can find all other solutions that share this "problem" and remove them from the result set. If you're lucky, the remaining data can be quantified ( i.e. you can assign a numeric value to each cell in the table) and the best solution can be located using some sort of max function.


Omer brandis.
"the best things in life aren't free, the best things in life were invented by mathematicians in the 1960's "


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