Section 5: Scenario analysis

Step 5: Scenario analysis > Score cards and SMART > Video score cards

• We started by listing the actors and making their problem explicit and later came up with many alternatives.
• The next step is to help yourself or your client to make a choice between all these different alternatives.
• The most common form is a table with all alternatives in the first row and all criteria in the first column.
• At that time, the government presented three different alternatives for this rail line: The first, a completely new line.
• Even though the second alternative was declared the cheapest and easiest, the track was considered too slow to be competitive with cars and planes.
• The parliament preferred alternative 1, an entirely new line as it would meet environmental and transportation aspects better than the other alternatives.
• Many actors had different alternatives as their preferred solution, for many different reasons.
• So how can we, as analysts or consultants, help these people to make a clear choice among the different alternatives? What you want to do is to make a clear overview of the analysis so far that enables to compare the alternatives and see how they score on the different criteria.
• It does not tell us whether an alternative is good or bad. However, is does tell something about how an alternative scores on the different criteria.
• So it makes a comparison of the different alternatives possible.
• In this course we provide two techniques to perform a multi-criteria-analysis: The Score Card technique and the Simple Multi Attribute Rating Technique, SMART in short.
• The first thing to do is to choose for what context scenario you will make a Score Card Alternatives will score differently in different potential futures.
• As consultant or manager, you do not only want to compare the alternatives on criteria, but you also want to know what alternatives are robust, i.e., what alternatives perform relatively well in many different potential futures.
• The criteria you put in this score card should be the same criteria you used in your causal diagram and in your problem diagram.
• Put all the alternatives that you want to compare in the first row.
• In principle they are the same alternatives you have identified and used in your causal diagram and problem diagram.
• There, for practical reasons, you might have made summaries and listed not all, but a set of alternatives.
• Here you list all alternatives, whether there are 4 or 400.
• Now, by taking values from the literature, by doing experiments, consulting experts or making estimates, determine the scores and fill in these scores in the table.
• The SMART builds upon the score card and is a more extensive technique for comparing alternatives.
• We present here normalisation of scores into values between 0 and 1, 0 being the worst and 1 being the best.
• First is to determine for every criterion what the highest and lowest value is for all alternatives.
• Add another row to the table for the weighted sum of the normalised values for each alternative.
• You get these by multiplying each value with the weight and add the scores.
• When we want to do that, we need a couple of alternatives to make sure that we can store and use the energy at a required time.
• In order to study these alternatives within my research team, we use score cards.
• The score cards also help us to understand exactly what criteria are important to study and understand the viability of these alternatives.
• That we start to think about how we can measure these criteria and what kind of modelling and analysis we still need to do to fill out these score cards.
• So this combination of ease of communication, helping us or maybe even forcing us to understand what kind of criteria are there and how we can measure and model them helps us a lot in getting a fast and good grip on the entire quite complex problem.
• The use of problem diagrams in combination with score cards helped us to evaluate the alternatives and to compare them and it forced us to make the criteria and their measurement and modelling very explicit.
• After doing all analyses of the problem situation and brainstorming for different alternatives, it was time to consider the impact of the possible alternatives both on her study results as on her private life.
• By looking at the consequences of several alternatives like dropping one of her hobbies or sports, skipping some of the courses, taking a less active role in her committee, sleeping less and many others, the student was able to come to a conclusion about a set of actions to improve the study results, without harming her private life too much.
• Let me help you by applying Score Cards and SMARTs to your own case.
• Score the different alternatives you identified on your chosen well-balanced set of criteria from your goal trees.
• When a certain alternative has higher costs, this is obviously a bad score for the one who has to pay, but not necessarily for the one who sells.
• In SMARTs you do not see the raw scores anymore, only a score between 0 and 1, thus it is very important that you do the normalisation well.
• The second is about weight factors, remember that the weight factors have a huge impact on the rank order of alternatives.
• The analytic ranking order of alternative can suddenly be completely different after a very small change in weight factors.
• This information can be even more interesting than the specific scores of the alternatives, as it says something about the usefulness of the method! Finally, don’t forget that the highest ranked alternative of the SMART table is not necessarily the best solution for the problem; SMART was just a tool to make the views of actors on what is important explicit.
• Use Score Cards and SMART’s as a group tool, discuss and come to a decision on what to do together.