Examining an Effective Decision Making Tool

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Examining an Effective Decision Making Tool What tools are available to assist teams in making a decision? In addition to creating an environment for effective decision making and reaching consensus on methods for making decisions as a team, there are tools that can assist teams in formulating and reaching decisions. Many of these tools were developed in the 1990s as companies working on improving quality and introducing self-managed team into the workplace. In decision-making there are many different decision-making models to assist us along the way. One thing with every decision- making model there are several decision-making tools needed to help narrow down the amount of information to only the ideas that are relevant to the decision at hand. In this paper we are going to examine one of the many different decision-making tools that can assist us in this process. The specific decision-making tool we shall discuss is for team-based decisions. MULTIVOTING In the decision making process brainstorming is used, by design, to generate a long list of ideas. If used alone this can become very overwhelming and unmanageable. Many of the ideas may not even be realistic or feasible. However Multivoting is designed to narrow the list or options into a manageable size for sincere consideration or study. It is not designed to help the group to make a single decision but can help the group to narrow a long list of ideas into a manageable number that can be discussed and explored. This will also allow the entire group to be involved and ultimately save the group a lot of time by allowing them to focus energy on the ideas with the greatest Potential. The following is an a model of Multivoting from the "Strengthening Extension ... ... middle of paper ... ...e Multivoting would be of no use. The second thing to consider is the number of ideas that were generated by brainstorming. If the number is very low then there is no real use for Multivoting, in fact it would be a waist of time that could better be spent working on the end decision. One thing to remember when using any decision-making tool is to keep the end in mind. In other words when working through a process, visualizing the end result is Helpful. We must also remember that in every decision-making process there are a multitude of tools to help us along the way. No tool is really better then another, in fact most are made to compliment each other not as a soul solution to the process at hand. [1] www.ca.uky.edu/agpsd/multivot.pdf pg. 1-2 [2] Excerpted from Nancy R. Tague's The Quality Toolbox, Second Edition, ASQ Quality Press, 2004, pages 359-361.

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