Once you have reviewed all of the Strategic Alternatives (review postings to Strategic Alternative-W4 thread), you should have a pretty comprehensive list of strategic alternatives or options. So how are you going to narrow down that list to identify the strategies that are most critical and manageable? The easiest and most objective way to accomplish this task is to use a weighed decision matrix. (This analytic technique was covered in a previous course on decision-making and problem solving). If you have identified many different strategies, it is often helpful to group like or complimentary strategies together before conducting the analysis. This reduces the number of options and simplifies the analysis. For instance, if you feel that StilSim needs improve its technological capabilities, you might group together a technology creation strategy with a technology-related training strategy. Once you have grouped complementary strategies together, check to see if you need to include any related, but mutually exclusive strategies in your list. Using the above example, a mutually exclusive technology strategy might be to purchase technology expertise through an acquisition (corporate strategy). Adding a mutually exclusive strategy to your list enables you to evaluate two different options with the matrix (build vs. buy) to determine which technology option is best for StilSim. Before conducting the weighted decision matrix analysis, you should also review the selected decision criteria and the weighting you choose for each criterion. There are many different criteria that you can choose for your matrix (customer impact, cost, ease of implementation, ROI, etc); evaluate your options carefully; strive for a balance. Evaluate how you apply the weighting. Which criteria are more important (more heavily weighted) and why? Make sure all criteria rating scales are in sync, ie., 1 = low, poor, not important, etc., and 9 = high, excellent, very important, etc. As you proceed through the matrix evaluation, carefully evaluate each criterion you are considering. (Don't rate everything a 5 and expect meaningful results.) As you review all of your strategic alternatives: How might you group like strategies together? What decision-making criteria need to be considered for the matrix? Why are they important? How are you going to weight the decision criteria? Which criteria should be given more weight? See this example to answer the question: How might you group like strategies together? The low cost strategy of standard policies and procedures for the entire company can be grouped with the focus of internal communication improvements because they both complement the idea of ensuring better customer service with customers. What decision-making criteria need to be considered for the matrix? Why are they important? The decision-making criteria I am considering are cost, return on investment, feasibility, customer acceptance. The cost of a strategy is important, because you do not want the expense of a solution to be greater than the revenue that it could potential generate. Return on investment is important to show shareholders that StilSim wants to improve its market presence while not incurring an ongoing expense to the company. The importance of feasibility is to ensure the strategy is innovative but still manageable by StilSim employees. If the strategy is too foreign to the employees that they cannot adopt the change, it will ultimately fail. A customer’s acceptance of a new strategy to improve the companyin any way is important because if it does not benefit the customer, it would have been an expensive waste of time. How are you going to weight the decision criteria? Which criteria should be given more weight? Criteria Weights Return on Investment at 0.4 Cost at 0.3 Customer Acceptance at 0.2 Feasibility at 0.1 The criteria given more weight is the return on investment and then cost because though customer acceptance and feasibility are important criteria to consider, the company’s impact to the profitability must be a greater priority. If the strategy cannot be affordable with only minimal impact to profits, the change will not be sustainable.