Work it through: Choosing Between Options

1

Your ducks

Start with what the people believe, what the paperwork says and what actually happens. The issues where your ducks disagree are the ones to carry into the homework.

You have not filled in the ducks sheet yet.

Start with your ducks

2

The homework

What has to be found before any of the four frameworks is worth running. Put a name and a date against each one, and tick it when you have it in your hands.

The ducks

Talk to the people involved, and to more than one of them.
WhoBy when
Read the documents, including the emails nobody thinks of as documents.
WhoBy when
Go and watch what actually happens.
WhoBy when

For Issue Trees & MECE

A precisely worded governing question, with a metric, a magnitude and a timeframe, that a named decision-maker would act on.
WhoBy when
A candidate logic for cleaving the problem: an arithmetic identity (profit equals price times volume minus cost), a process, or a segmentation.
WhoBy when
Access to the data and the people needed to size branches roughly before deep analysis begins.
WhoBy when
Agreed criteria for prioritising branches, usually the size of the prize and your ability to influence it.
WhoBy when

For Decision Matrix (Weighted Scoring)

A shortlist of real, available options, including the incumbent or do-nothing baseline where one exists.
WhoBy when
The people who own the decision and the people who will live with it, both represented when criteria and weights are set.
WhoBy when
Evidence about each option: demonstrations, references, trials, cost breakdowns, enough that scores can be anchored rather than invented.
WhoBy when
A defined scoring scale and a rule for what weights sum to, agreed before scoring starts.
WhoBy when
A list of absolute constraints, screened out separately, so must-pass requirements are never averaged away by good scores elsewhere.
WhoBy when

For Impact-Effort Matrix

A defined list of candidate actions at roughly comparable granularity, since plotting 'fix the newsletter' against 'transform the operating model' produces nonsense.
WhoBy when
A shared definition of impact: on which goal, over what time horizon, for whom. Unstated horizons are where these workshops quietly go wrong.
WhoBy when
Effort estimates from the people who would actually do the work, covering time, money and attention rather than time alone.
WhoBy when
Willingness to act on the bottom-right quadrant, because a matrix that never kills anything is a poster, and enough time to argue placements honestly.
WhoBy when

For MoSCoW Prioritisation

A defined delivery and a stated timeframe, because every MoSCoW priority is relative to a specific deadline rather than absolute.
WhoBy when
A requirements list at reasonably consistent granularity, with rough effort estimates attached.
WhoBy when
An agreed, written test for Must have, set before any categorisation begins.
WhoBy when
The decision-makers in the room: business owners who can accept a Won't, and delivery people who know what things cost.
WhoBy when
A record-keeping habit, since the value of the Won't have list depends on it being written down and revisited.
WhoBy when

3

Step 1 of 4: Issue Trees & MECE

Before weighing anything, break the question into parts that do not overlap and leave nothing out. "Should we open a second site" becomes "do we need more capacity, and if so where is the cheapest place to get it", and the second site turns out to be one option among five, two of which nobody had named. The tree is how you find out whether the options in front of you are the real ones. Ten minutes of this has saved me afternoons of careful choosing.

Watch forA tree built to arrive at the answer somebody already wanted. If every branch but one is thin, somebody has been pruning.

What you need first

Ticked on the homework list above.

A precisely worded governing question, with a metric, a magnitude and a timeframe, that a named decision-maker would act on.
A candidate logic for cleaving the problem: an arithmetic identity (profit equals price times volume minus cost), a process, or a segmentation.
Access to the data and the people needed to size branches roughly before deep analysis begins.
Agreed criteria for prioritising branches, usually the size of the prize and your ability to influence it.

Define the governing question
Break it down MECE
Prioritise the branches
Test with hypotheses
Iterate and synthesise

0 of 5 steps filled · 0 of 4 inputs in hand

What comes out, and how to read it

A one-page structure of the problem: the governing question at the trunk, a MECE set of branches with rough sizings, a marked set of priority branches, and a hypothesis with a killer analysis for each. Behind it, an evidence-based answer that can be traced back through the tree.

Read the trunk first: if the governing question is woolly, nothing downstream can be trusted.
Check the cleave before the content. An overlap or a gap at layer one silently corrupts every conclusion below it.
Look at where the effort went. A good tree shows most analysis concentrated in a few sized branches and the rest deliberately parked.
Treat the summed answer with suspicion until cross-branch interactions have been checked.

Read the full entry

4

Step 2 of 4: Decision Matrix (Weighted Scoring)

With the real options in view, weigh the big ones in the open. Agree the criteria first and weight them before anyone scores, because once the scores start the weights get bent to fit the favourite. Then score each option against each criterion and let the totals speak. The product is a decision whose reasoning can be seen and argued with, which is worth more than the decision itself, because the argument is what the room will remember when it is challenged.

Watch forOne criterion that really dominates. If price is everything, or safety is absolute, a weighted blend of everything else only hides that; say so and decide on the one thing.

Option	wt	wt	wt	Total
				–
				–
				–

Set the weights (they need not sum to 100) and score each option to see the weighted totals.

Read the full entry

5

Step 3 of 4: Impact-Effort Matrix

The long list does not deserve a matrix each. Put every candidate on a grid of what it would do against what it would cost, and four verdicts fall out: the quick wins to do now, the major projects to plan, the fill-ins for a quiet week, and the thankless tasks to stop pretending about. The grid's real gift is licence: it lets a team drop work that earns nothing, which most teams cannot do without permission.

Watch forAnything big or hard to undo being settled here. Two gut-feel axes are for sorting a list, never for committing serious money; that went through the matrix in step two.

Quick wins

Major projects

Fill-ins

Thankless tasks

0 of 4 blocks filled

Read the full entry

6

Step 4 of 4: MoSCoW Prioritisation

Now agree, before the pressure, what must be delivered, what should, what could, and what will not this time. The last category is the whole point. Every plan runs short of time, and the question is whether what gives way was chosen in a calm room in advance or by whoever shouted loudest in the final week. Writing the "won't" list now is the kindest thing you can do for the people who will have to deliver.

Watch forA "must" list that holds most of the work. If everything is a must, nothing has been decided; the test is that the musts alone would be worth shipping.

Must have

Should have

Could have

Won't have this time

0 of 4 blocks filled

Read the full entry

7

The review date

Set the date you will come back and ask whether it worked. Put it in your diary; this site will not remind you.

Review date

Print the dossier