DecisionPad Benefits
More Effective Use of Meetings
- Powerful facilitation tool – a facilitator controls DecisionPad and provides a framework for the discussion. Gather everyone’s input, converge on a consensus, and document the result.
- Saves time in meetings – regardless of the personalities and pet issues of the participants. When someone has an aspect of the decision they’re passionate about, it can be added to the worksheet for consideration. There’s no need to keep revisiting it as it’s been captured for the overall decision.
- Remembers where you left off – DecisionPad captures the issues, assessments, and data brought to a meeting. When the team returns for more discussion, they can immediately move forward with new issues.
- Gather input before having a meeting – the facilitator can pull together a decision model with much of the information ahead of time by interviews and email, so when people gather face-to-face their time is used effectively.
- Intuitive user interface – DecisionPad is designed to allow you to start working without training, meeting participants can immediately comprehend and use DecisionPad to evaluate options. It’s transparent, allowing full access to the effects of changes. There are also a number of enhancements that will allow you to accurately document and assess all the nuances of a decision process.
Get Through the Decision Process Quickly & With Confidence
- The DecisionPad JumpStart Wizard lets you dive right in, with suggestions and step-by-step guidance through your first decision.
- Your decision worksheet and reports will be automatically generated from your inputs to give to management for final approval.
- Stimulate complete discussion of all decision factors. The worksheet makes it easy to try “what if?” situations with it –
- see what happens when you tweak a score or weight.
- If you find you’re getting a result that doesn’t align with your expectations, you can make sure that all relevant criteria are included.
- Perhaps there will be a different winner when vendor reputation or employee reliability are added in as criteria.
- Combat decision fatigue. People get worn out arguing over things, and become either afraid to make the wrong choices or impatient to just do something, anything. DecisionPad lets you focus on the relevant issues with the confidence you’ll be able to justify and document the team’s decision.
- Facts and Opinions handled together. No need to worry that people are making a decision because of the color of the product or the charm of the sales person. Subjective criteria, opinions, are collected, broken out by as many different aspects as you want. Facts are entered as hard data. Both are crunched by DecisionPad and weighted as your organization finds appropriate. This reduces the possibility of emotional or impulsive decision-making.
- Reduce risk by getting everything out in the open before implementation, and by having a record of all the issues considered for people and organizations who were not part of the decision process.
Improve Organizational Communication
- Clear, easy-to use worksheets and reports allow you to explain the decision or recommendation, without wasting time explaining the methodology. This can speed approvals. The worksheet and reports are intuitive and easily understood by the non-technical members of your team.
- Create buy-in to the decision. Everyone involved can see the reason for the final outcome, and can see that their concerns were addressed along with the other factors.
- Confidence in the quality of the decision across the organization will, of itself, improve the probability of success.
- Interview tool – a consultant or internal analyst can sit with people involved in the decision and use it as a tool to focus the discussion on their needs.
Stop Wasting Time Discussing Things That Don’t Matter
- Sensitivity Analysis is a fancy term for “if it won’t affect the decision let’s not waste time talking about it.”
- Example:
- Sam in Sales thinks the ability to easily track prospects is the most important consideration for the new contact management tool.
- Fred in Finance thinks the price is most important.
- Example:
- Unknown elements are handled. You can have a worksheet that’s half full of question marks – information you don’t have yet. DecisionPad will show you when there’s still a range of possible winners. As soon as you’ve collected enough information to nudge one out ahead of the pack, you can stop sending emails and phone calls to vendors or waiting for that last appendix to your RFP.
- Reduce analysis paralysis by forcing clarity. Once the issues are identified and visible people become willing to move ahead. Delay in itself can often be a serious risk.
Document Your Decisions
- The worksheet and reports fully document the decision and the justifications for it. This is helpful for:
- Demonstrating compliance with applicable statutes and regulations – and if vendors need to be shown the worksheet, you can use a coded “alias” for the other competitors
- Remembering why the decision was made as it was
- Preventing needing to re-evaluate all the same information next year
- Reducing ongoing discussions second-guessing the decision made
- Starting the next decision process, as in when a contract is up for reevaluation
- Tracking your organizational priorities across decisions and making consistent choices
- Borrow the structure for a previous decision as the starting point for a similar one; it’s easily adapted where needed. No need to start from scratch, even when the people involved are different.
DecisionPad is easy to use, analytically powerful, and gives you the flexibility to collect and analyze data in ways that work for you. More details are on our Features page. You can download the Demo try DecisionPad for free, or contact Sales with any questions or to order: sales@apian.com, (800) 237-4565.
