Real-World Project Management: Beyond Conventional Wisdom, Best Practices, and Project Methodologies

Chapter 9. The Analytic Hierarchy Process

In every project, decisions need to be made: selecting the right equipment, choosing the best vendor to supply parts, selecting the most secure wireless technology, the best training for the lowest price, and so on. Most decision processes involve setting up some kind of grid that shows the decision criteria, assigning each criterion a specified weight (i.e., how important it is), and matching various products against each criterion to deliver an overall score. A typical example of this type of grid is shown in Figure 9.1. In this case, we are evaluating four copiers.

Notice each criterion is given a weight, that is, its relative importance compared with the other criteria on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the least important and 10 being the most important. Each product is then scored against each criterion on a scale of 1 to 10 to show how well each product scored compared to the others. Then the weight is multiplied by the score to produce the weighted score for each criterion. Add up the weighted scores for each product, and the one with the highest score wins—or so it's supposed to go.

This type of decision process is problematic for several reasons:

Figure 9.1. Figure 9.1

• It is too easy to skew the results based on someone's personal agenda. Maybe someone has a preference for Oce because a good friend is the CFO of the company.

• Only quantitative ...