The final step — Evaluating alternatives
Hi everybody, I’m Riccardo. I’m an iOS Engineer at Bending Spoons since 2015. My main focuses are related to App Development, Lib Development, and Tech growth.
This is the fifth part of a series of articles related to problem-solving. You can find the other parts here:
We finally reached the last article in this series! The question we answer today is: what should we do to solve our problem?
We have a couple of tools to make this decision: the cost/impact matrix and the pro/con comparison.
Cost/Impact Matrix
The cost/impact matrix helps us understand how much will cost implementing a specific solution and how significant are its benefits, compared to the other solutions.
On the x-axis of the matrix, there is the cost; on the y-axis, there is the impact. These will let us divide the space into 4 quadrants:
- High-Impact/Low-Cost (in the top-left),
- High-Impact/High-Cost (in the top-right),
- Low-Impact/Low-Cost (in the bottom-left),
- Low-Impact/High-Cost (in the bottom-right).
Of course, the best quadrant is the first one: whenever we have high-impact solutions that have also a low cost, they are the best candidates to solve our problem.
Once we created the matrix structure, we can go through the list of alternatives and lay them down in the matrix, comparing each of them against the others. Finally, choose the ones that generate the highest value for the lowest cost.
Pro/Con Comparison
The pro/con comparison lets us understand which alternative is the best according to some specific dimensions. Differently from the cost/impact matrix, where we have two well-defined criteria to evaluate our solution, in the pro/con comparison, we have to define our dimensions and these depend on the problem.
For example, if we have to choose between different gyms, we can look at:
- Distance from home
- Distance from office
- Cost
- How new are the machinery
- How many courses it offers
- How many personal trainers are there
But, for another problem, we have to consider different criteria.
Once we defined the dimension, we have to define a rating scale. We can use `+` and `-`, we can use stars like the app store, we can use whatever we prefer. The goal is to assign a rating to every metric for every alternative.
It will result in a table that has the alternatives as a header; all the dimensions as the first column; the ratings of all the pairs <alternative, dimension> as rows.
Once we have done that, we can sum up all the columns to have the final scores of the alternatives. This creates a chart of the alternatives and we can choose the best one(s) among them!
Conclusion
We finally went through the whole decision-making process to solve any problem. Don’t forget that the most important thing, once we make a decision, is to put it in place. Act! Do it!
I hope you enjoy this series of articles. If you have other tools you use to chose between alternatives, let me know: this is another topic I’m interested in.
