COLLABORATION THROUGH
DECISION LENS WEB
Decision Lens is now offering a NEW Web-based platform called Decision Lens Web
It's that time of year again. Fall is in full-swing and the annual planning and budgeting cycle is kicking into high gear. That feeling that most managers feel this time of year is not due to shorter days and cooler nights, but instead another dreaded realization: that the all-too-familiar budget negotiation and bargaining has begun and will last for the next few months. At many companies, this taxing back-and-forth annual process between the decision makers and the people requesting funds to support their initiatives is indicative of the general approach to planning and budgeting. You have multiple stakeholders involved, and many variables and tradeoffs to make. It's challenging to get people on the same page, and once they are how do you ensure that your investments are aligned with your strategic objectives for 2008?
Wouldn't you like to improve the effectiveness of key decisions by clarifying the needs and priorities of each of the participants, while also dramatically decreasing the "hand wringing" and time to make key decisions? What if you were able to do all of this through an advanced Web application that enabled collaboration without the need to bring everyone into a room for each step of the planning process? No software downloads, and easy to add new participants as voters or reviewers?
Decision Lens is now offering a new Web-based platform called Decision Lens Web that brings together your team to define your objectives, make tradeoffs among competing priorities, and align those priorities directly with budgeting and investment decisions in projects, products, programs, and people.
Decision Lens Web is a Rich Internet Application that has all of the dynamic interactivity, color and utility of the desktop application but is accessed through the Internet, enabling participants and facilitators to contribute remotely from anywhere around the world. They can participate as a live session, or use "At-Your-Convenience" voting to enter their judgments according to their own schedule.
Decision Lens Web integrates a set of powerful decision-making tools into a straightforward yet effective step-by-step process:
- Identify and organize the decision variables, including key objectives and related factors
- Evaluate numerous and often competing alternatives among other participants or stakeholders
- Test the outcome by performing "what if" sensitivity analysis
- Apply the results in order to create and optimize budgets
- Communicate the findings across your organization easily with the integrated reporting capabilities
The easy-to-use interface allows you to quickly apply Decision Lens to your most critical business decisions, making it possible for you and your organization to realize benefits from day one.
Special features of
Decision Lens Web
Decision Lens Web utilizes Flash™ technology to deliver a secure, highly interactive and unparalleled experience.
The application is powerful, effective and convenient, and requires no software downloads or installations.
The integrated Decision Lobby is a central portal where your organization can manage and save decisions. While allowing you to share key information with others, the Decision Lobby also gives you control over who has access.
This secure web-based application utilizes Decision Lens' patent-pending management and control access framework, which enables you to define different roles for users–from voters, to reviewers, to backup facilitators and more.
Remote users can participate in same-time online conferences or use At-Your-Convenience Voting™, where they can cast their votes at their leisure and then save them to the decision model.
The integrated chat capability allows you to collaborate with other remote participants, moving the process forward, encouraging participation, and eliciting key information–all while dramatically reducing the amount of time and travel needed.
Decision Daily Tip – from Dan's Desk
We do not recommend having a single team do an entire decision model in most cases, and 20 criteria is way too many to initiate a team into structured decision making. You have to remember that most organizations currently use either one criterion (money) or a very small set of criteria. Usually we are dealing with 10 total criteria or less.
People are already taking a lot of time to make these decisions whether they use Decision Lens or not and what we help with is to optimize each of those sessions. We do not have senior management involved in rating all of the projects. Senior management prioritizes the objectives and those sessions are usually an hour or so. Their other role in the process is to review the results and apply their own rules to how money is allocated.
Instead of thinking of a typical project prioritization decision as one jam session for two days it is actually several short sessions with different people.
The senior executives prioritize 5-9 business objectives in less than one hour in most cases.
The portfolio team (mid-level management such as middle marketing or product managers) develop rating scales then have the product or marketing teams rate their own projects. The ratings are short collaborative sessions because they are not asking people to rate other people's projects. With the new Web product, people can even do ratings asynchronously. People will be held accountable for achieving the ratings value for their projects so they are incentivized to be honest.
Finally budget data is put in and budget scenarios are run.
If your goal is to allocate your project budget in an hour or two with this process, that is unrealistic. But to build a robust and meaningful decision model will require some time from a number of different levels of managers. With that said, it is far less time than the 4-6 weeks of budget wrangling meetings they do today.
Managing Business Process Improvement Programs in Strategy Focused Organizations
The August issue of Six Sigma Forum Magazine featured an article by Decision Lens founder Daniel Saaty who co-authored an article on applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process and Decision Lens to managing business process improvement and project selection. Download the PDF »
CFO Magazine features
Decision Lens
November Issue Article on Virtual and Online Group Brainstorming.
View the article »
Decision Lens Announces
New Commercial Customers
- eBay
- Corporate Executive Board
- Amtrak
- Education Management Corporation
- Shorebank
- Wells Dairy
- Inter-American Development Bank
New Government Customers
- United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
- United States Navy
- United States Air Force
- National Defense University
