UDCide

UDeCide can help you find your way through three different types of small business management decisions. In Group Dynamics you are led through a series of questions which help determine the best course of action for leader-group type decisions in the small business. With Decisions Under Chance you can deal with small business situations where certain factors are out of your control, but you have some estimate of the probability of their occurrence. Finally, in Decisions with Intangibles you can deal with situations involving "fuzzy" factors, such as weighing "experience" versus "personality" in an employment interview.

Group Dynamics Decisions are based on Vroom's Decision Tree (Victor H. Vroom, "A New Look at Managerial Decision Making", Organizational Dynamics, vol1. No. 4, Spring 1973, pp 69-71). To arrive at a "Leader-Subordinate Relations" decision, you only need to answer up to 7 Yes or No questions.

The program asks the appropriate questions, which often depend on you previous answers, and, using Vroom's Decision Tree, presents that one of the five basic management decision styles which is appropriate for the situation.

In Decisions Under Chance, the program asks for the number of alternatives you must choose from, (e.g., plant expansion, build a new plant, leave things as they are) and the number of chance conditions (e.g., booming or stable economy or recession) that exist which will affect the outcome of your decision. A simple example might be deciding on recreation based on possible weather conditions.

You enter the numbers, then attach captions to them

Next you fill in your best estimate of the probability of occurrence for each chance event.

Next, you fill in your estimate of the outcomes for each combination of an alternative and a chance event. This can be measured in dollars, market share, morale, or any other type of measurement that makes sense.

That done, the program calculates the expected outcomes for each alternative, and tells you which has the highest score.

Decisions involving Intangibles are attacked in much the same way, except that instead of dealing with probabilities, you deal with the relative importance of intangible decision factors such as personality, attitude, etc. Again, you start by defining the number of each.

And, as in decisions under chance, you provide captions for each alternative and decision factor. In this case, we're using a hiring decision as an example. We have three candidates and four decision factors.

Next we define the relative importance of each of the decision factors.

Having done that, we evaluate each alternative in terms of each decision factor.

When this is completed, the program calculates the overall relative scores for each alternative, in this case, which candidate looked best in terms of the decision factors we used.

Of course we don't really expect you to let a computer program make a decision for you. However, running a difficult decision through this program helps you to focus on what's really important, and hopefully, points you in the right directions. For only $49.95, can you afford to be without it?