Ranking & Rating - Option Selection

This technique helps a group to arrive at a speedy consensus decision as to which of several options (possibly generated by brainstorming) is the best one to opt for. It is, for example, often used to decide where to locate a new office or factory, and is often used to evaluate and select tenders in contracts management.

It is particularly useful for a group which has to prioritise - decide which problems they should decide to tackle first, or which solution to pursue.

The general procedure is:

Step 1 - As a group, discuss and agree on the Criteria to be used to guide your selection. Try to have five or less.

For a new factory, the criteria might include:
- cost of labour
- availability of labour with required skills
- cost of land
- access to motorways
- proximity of main customers
For a group selecting projects, the criteria might include some from:
- savings on cost of poor quality
- customer benefits
- internal effectiveness
- ease of solution
- availability of data
- visibility of solution

Step 2 - Weight the criteria according to relative importance.

A simple approach is to give the most important ones 100 and score the others below that in terms of importance.

Step 3 - Draw up a matrix as shown in the worked example below

With the options along the top, and the Criteria with their weightings down the left side.

Step 4 - Take each criteria in turn and score each option out of the weighting for that criteria,

e.g. In the example below. Ease of Solution has a weighting of 50. Each option is scored out of 50. The easiest to solve is Messages are lost which is scored at 40. The most difficult to solve is Poor Parking which is scored at 10 out of 50.

Step 5 - Sum the scores for each option.

The option with the highest score fulfils your criteria best and is the one you should choose.

Example

A Hotel Quality Steering Group is selecting quality problems to tackle. They have brainstormed about 30 such problems and used voting to refine that to 4. It has chosen its criteria and weighted them giving Customer Satisfaction 100, Visibility of Solution 20, and the rest in between.

CRITERIA	WEIGHTINGS	Messages are lost	Customers mis-booked	Staff Parking	Long Queues at booking-out
Customer Satisfaction	100	70	60	10	90
Ease of Solution	50	40	30	10	20
Cost of Waste	30	20	30	00	5
Visibility of Solution	20	5	10	20	10
Involvement of Staff	70	70	50	20	50
TOTAL		205	180	60	175

It then takes each criteria in turn and scores the problems out of the weighting.

For Customer Satisfaction they decide that solving Queues at Booking Out would contribute most and score it 90 out of 100. Parking for Staff would contribute least and they score it 10 out of 100. Similarly for the rest of the problems and criteria.

The result is that Messages are Lost fulfils the criteria and weightings best and is chosen as the first problem to be tackled.