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

Whether managing strategy, operations or products, knowing how to make the best decision in a complex, uncertain business environment is difficult. You might be faced with multiple, competing objectives, which means making trade-offs. To complicate matters, any uncertainty makes it hard to explicitly understand how different objectives will impact potential outcomes. This book will help you face these problems. It provides a decision analysis framework implemented as a simple spreadsheet tool. This multi-objective decision analysis framework helps you to measure trade-offs among objectives and incorporate uncertainties and risk preferences. With this book, you will be able to identify what information is needed to make a decision, define how that information should be combined, and, finally, provide quantifiable evidence to clearly communicate and justify the decision. The process involves minimal overhead and is perfect for busy professionals who need a simple, structured process for making, tracking, and communicating decisions. This process makes decision making more efficient by focusing only on information and factors that are well-defined, measurable, and relevant to the decision at hand. The framework requires clear characterization of a decision, ensuring that it can be traced and is consistent with the intended objectives and organizational values. Using this structured decision-making framework, anyone can consistently make better decisions to gain competitive and strategic advantage.

About the Author

Clinton W. Brownley, Ph.D., is the founder of CWB Decision Solutions, Inc., an analytics-based management consulting company headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. In 2007, Dr. Brownley was an adjunct faculty member at American University, where he taught a graduate course on operations research techniques, decision analysis, and spreadsheet modeling. Dr. Brownley is a council member for CPMS: The Practice Section of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences, an Executive Committee member for the Statistical Consulting Section of the American Statistical Association, and is also an active member of the Decision Analysis Society. Dr. Brownley received B.S. and M.S. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. degree from American University.