We call it the A, B, C's of decision making:
Alignment, Buy-in and Confidence.
Whether you are working on your organization’s annual planning and budgeting exercise or analyzing which component should go into the next fighter jet, Expert Choice can help you simplify your decision process.
Both of these decisions entail too many variables – including competing objectives, uncertainty, limited resources, and multiple stakeholders – for one person to manage. Based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Expert Choice software provides a structured approach and proven process for prioritization and decision-making. Expert Choice not only helps decision-makers arrive at the best decision, but also provides a clear rationale for that decision.
Our solutions are designed for business and government leaders who want to save time and improve their bottom lines by:
- Implementing a structured, repeatable and justifiable decision-making approach
- Aligning their decisions with their organizational objectives
- Leveraging organizational expertise
- Improving top-down and bottom-up communication
- Building consensus
The Analytical Hierarchy Process
The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a powerful and flexible decision making process to help people set priorities and make the best decision when both qualitative and quantitative aspects of a decision need to be considered. By reducing complex decisions to a series of one-on-one comparisons, then synthesizing the results, AHP not only helps decision makers arrive at the best decision, but also provides a clear rationale that it is the best.
Designed to reflect the way people actually think, AHP was developed in the 1970’s by Dr. Thomas Saaty, while he was a professor at the Wharton School of Business, and continues to be the most highly regarded and widely used decision-making theory. In 1983, Dr. Saaty joined Dr. Ernest Forman, a professor of management science at George Washington University, to co-found Expert Choice.
The AHP and Expert Choice software engage decision makers in structuring a decision into smaller parts, proceeding from the goal to objectives to sub-objectives down to the alternative courses of action. Decision makers then make simple pairwise comparison judgments throughout the hierarchy to arrive at overall priorities for the alternatives. The decision problem may involve social, political, technical, and economic factors.
The AHP helps people cope with the intuitive, the rational and the irrational, and with risk and uncertainty in complex settings. It can be used to: predict likely outcomes, plan projected and desired futures, facilitate group decision making, exercise control over changes in the decision making system, allocate resources, select alternatives, do cost/benefit comparisons, evaluate employees and allocate wage increases.
Expert Choice is intuitive, graphically based and structured in a user-friendly fashion so as to be valuable for conceptual and analytical thinkers, novices and category experts. Because the criteria are presented in a hierarchical structure, decision makers are able to drill down to their level of expertise, and apply judgments to the objectives deemed important to achieving their goals. At the end of the process, decision makers are fully cognizant of how and why the decision was made, with results that are meaningful, easy to communicate, and actionable.
