Decision prioritization procedure
The criteria for selecting which decisions will be reviewed is context dependent and has to be negotiated between the stakeholders. The criteria could be mission-critical decisions, decisions known to bear risks, or decisions causing high costs, for instance.
In principle, different methods can be used to identify the decisions that are reviewed in the next DCAR steps. Here we briefly present one method that has proven to work well in some of our own DCAR evaluations.
One result of the previous DCAR steps is a list of elicited decisions. These decisions were already briefly discussed between all participants to make sure that there is a common understanding of the decisions, and that they have unambiguous names. The prioritization is done in two phases.
In the first phase of the prioritization procedure, each participant chooses five most important decisions using the previously agreed on criteria. The number of chosen decisions may vary depending on the total number of the identified decisions. However, typically five is a good number to use here. Decisions that were not chosen by at least two participants are excluded from the remaining voting procedure. Usually, this phase leads to a drastic reduction of decisions.
In the second phase, each review participant gets 100 points. He or she can distribute the points over the decisions remaining after phase one, based on the previously agreed on criteria for the importance of decisions. However, the stakeholder should emphasize his or hers interest in the decisions when distributing the points. Then the points of all participants are collected. The DCAR participants discuss the rationale behind each person’s choices and check the relation of the choices to the forces, which were elicited beforehand. About 25% of the decisions with the highest rating are taken to the next steps of DCAR (depending on the available time, a higher or a lower percentage may be used).
It is not recommended to follow the voting procedure dogmatically. Depending on the circumstances during a review session, the participants can decide to deviate from this procedure, for instance because an important stakeholder insists on reviewing specific decisions.