Decideware

How many questions?

One of the most common questions we get asked is "what is the optimum number of questions in an agency/supplier scorecard?".

Of course there is no right answer but there may well be a way to reduce the number of questions you want to ask.

Upside and Downside

The technique is to calculate the VALUE that each criteria brings to the party!

This implies that in measuring the criteria there is an upside, i.e. it leads to action that will…

• reduce cost
• improve performance
• reduce risk
• improve satisfaction

…and also that there is a down-side…

• assessors time and effort in collecting & answering a question (if it is qualitative metric)
• sourcing and aggregating data (if it is a quantitative metric)

Value = Importance - Effort

The term I used above "Value" is rather obscure and needs to be simplified. The technique we use is to calculate the importance that each measurement criteria is assigned. We use a great mathematical algorithm called the Analytical Hierarchy Process, which asks a user to "trade-off" each criteria against the other to come up with an importance weighting.

So you will naturally find that some criteria have so little importance assigned to them that they just are not worth the effort in asking.

Your challenge is two balance the two sides Importance vs. Effort and using your judgement keep it in or take it out!

Author: Richard Benyon, Decideware