[localhost]

This is a really nice presentation of these ideas.

However, I think that the Decision Matrix idea is too complicated: specifically the part where he advocates adding a weighting to each factor being considered to arrive at a numerical score.

At Microsoft, some of us use a system that I like to call the "Abolade decision making framework." It's the same idea, but instead of assigning weights to factors, we simply rank them. Additionally, the factors are expressed as positive attributes and an option either has that factor or it doesn't. A factor could be "Has vibrant colors" or it could be "Less than $10" for example. The type of a factor is Boolean :)

The goal is to generate a table with the options presented as columns and the factors presented as rows. You spend a lot of time as a group figuring out what the factors are, and then you spend a lot of time ranking them. Once you have agreement, you start working on the options. The winning option is one where you have the longest continuous line of check marks for each factor starting from the top.

Smart people, of course will try to game this system to choose their preferred outcome ... you need to be vigilant about this :)

[khimaros]

Is there somewhere I could read further about the Abolade framework? I can't seem to find any good resources from a quick web search.

[localhost]

I don’t think there’s anything public about this. Not that there is anything particularly secret about this at all. It’s very straightforward and I’ve described its salient points above.

[asdfgeoff]

+1, I would love to read more about this, particularly around how it scales to multiple (possibly overlapping) options.

> Additionally, the factors are expressed as positive attributes and an option either has that factor or it doesn't.

This is very intuitive for binary decisions, where the "pros" of one option are the "cons" of the other. How do you scale it to multiple options though? (e.g. if I am deciding between internet providers, speed is clearly an important factor, but I may have 3 options with low/medium/high speed respectively)