Simple example ranking and weighting
Simple example
Using a simple decision making step for ranking and weighting
A very simple method of assessing which strategy to choose involves attaching specific criteria that you are looking for.
You can then rate each strategy according to these criteria.
In addition, as each criteria will not be of equal importance you can ‘weight’ them.
This is usually done by attaching a value such that all of the values add up to 100.
The diagram provides a simple example.
This simple example looks at buying a car and taking into account the type of fuel.
It is easy to extend this principle to, for example, fuel efficiency, the cost or perhaps the status value.
In the spreadsheet you first begin by identifying the features that you believe are relevant.
In this case, diesel or not (others might be mpg (miles per gallon), cost and status).
For each of these you rank each car out of 10 (1 low, 10 high) for each feature against each car.
In this case we allocated 10, 5, 10 and 10 for cars ‘A’ to ‘D’.
Once you have done this you need to assess the relative importance of all of the features you listed.
This should add up to 100%. That is for all the elements referred to above:
Diesel 10 (used as the weighting in the table)
mpg 15
Cost 50
Status 25
In this case, you rate the use of diesel as low on your list relative to the cost.
The weight is then added to the table and multiplied by the rank to give the value for diesel across the selection of cars.
You then repeat this for every feature and finally add up all of the values to give a total.
The highest total is the car you should ideally purchase, given the overall consideration of your features and ranking.
This system lends itself easily to non complex scenarios and is easy to modify quickly to view the differing features in the results.