Strategic Decison Making
      Resource Allocation
      Lessons Learned
      Biography
 

Multi-objective Decision Analysis is a tool that can help you set strategic direction.

Revise your mission or clarify your existing mission. In the process, create measurable performance criteria for all your fundamental objectives, not just the financial ones. Build a set of strategies that will help you implement your mission. This decision aid is designed particularly for small nonprofit organizations, such as a dance company or charter school, whose resources are scarce.

Use your mission to help you make a difficult, complex decision that can’t be satisfactorily solved with intuition or heated debate. Understand and recognize risks by naming them, by assessing their impact and by starting to understand how to manage them. Develop new ideas and gain a new way of thinking of old problems, re-imagining issues from a new perspective.

Key benefits

• It forces policy makers to articulate clearly what is important and why.
• It offers a structured and creative process for generating new ideas.
• It helps individuals step away from their biases and see other view points.
• It provides a fair and consistent method for evaluating alternative strategies.
• It helps us manage what we don’t know.

By using this structured approach, participants spend more time evaluating decision alternatives and less time arguing vague concepts.

Other Resources
The following documents require Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Strategic Decision Making Case Study
Ballet Arts Minnesota - Priorities for Growth: Objectives and criteria for assessing progress, unpublished paper, September 2003

Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take?
Tangible results are available after the first 2-hour meeting with policy makers. For a small non-profit, three to a dozen 2-hour sessions. A larger organization could require additional meetings, depending on the scope of the plan.

Why should I use a new method?
If we continue using the same old way, we will keep making the same mistakes.

What people need to be involved?
Board members or a policy setting body, such as senior management. Technical experts, such as managers and staff. Representatives of other key stakeholders.

What resources are required?
Meeting room with easel, flip chart paper, markers & tape. Overhead projector or laptop projector

What are the deliverables?
Deliverables are defined as part of the project scoping. The work is completed in phases, with evaluation of each step before proceeding with the next. Examples of deliverables include:

• Objectives Hierarchy
• Influence diagram and performance scales for each fundamental objective
• Influence diagram for each key uncertainty
• Poker chip exercise for weight assessment of value objectives
• Strategy table that includes multiple strategy themes and combinations of program options
• Evaluation of each strategy theme
• Recommended strategy
• Lessons learned findings

How much does it cost?
Cost depends on the scope of the project and number of steps completed.

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