Analytical and Decision-Making Techniques

Here are techniques for business analysis and decision making that should help you as you implement your e-learning, Run through these techniques whenever you are making major decisions until they become second nature to you.

Trade-off. Every business decision is a trade-off. (If there's no trade-off, there's really no decision to be made.) List the pros and cons of the alternatives you are weighing. Try to be aware of what you're trading off when making a decision.

Risk. Every decision is made with less-than-perfect information, and every decision entails taking a risk. The way to make sound decisions is to judge when you have enough information to move ahead and when the level of risk is acceptable. A decision maker who takes no risk receives no reward. A decision maker who disregards risk is a fool, a pauper, or both. Financial decisions trade off risk and reward. Make sure your upside reward outweighs your downside risk.

Empathy. To understand your customers, walk a mile in their shoes. Here's how: Make up several representative customers (personas). Give them names, positions, preferences, gripes, habits, intelligence, and personalities. When you're planning marketing campaigns and learning activities, stop every now and again to slip into these personas' shoes. How does your proposal make them feel?

Inputs and Outputs. The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes the common situation where 20 percent of the effort achieves 80 percent of the results. Its not uncommon for 20 percent of the sales force to make 80 percent of the sales, or for 20 percent of the customers to generate 80 percent of the profits. It's likely that 20 percent of your effort produces 80 percent of your results. The point is that input and output are not balanced. Marketers break the market into pieces, or segments, to identify and focus their attention on the significant few who produce most of the results.

For designers of learning experiences, less is often more. Find the elusive 20 percent of the learner's time that yields 80 percent of what is learned and put your energies there.

The Bottom Line. Revenue minus costs equals profit. Over time, profit and shareholder value are the same thing. The total value of the shares is equivalent to the stream of expected future profits, discounted for the cost of capital. You must be able to relate your decisions and choices to the profitability of your organization. Otherwise, you will not be able to make sound decisions as conditions change.

A Core Focus. Shareholder value (also known as the market cap) is a function of sustained competitive advantage, and organizations achieve it by leveraging their core competencies. Focus on core; outsource everything else. Everything else is context (overhead), and context is a needless distraction. Without careful management, context always gets in the way of core because it absorbs time, talent, and management attention (Moore, 2000).

Business leaders present themselves to the world as confident, authoritative, conservative, results-oriented, deliberate, and a bit staid. Its best to leave your clown suit in the closet when you're selling an e-learning concept to executives. Be concise. Hit the concepts described above as they apply to your project. When you've said your piece, ask for questions and sit down.

A decision maker who takes no risk receives no reward. A decision maker who disregards risk is a fool, a pauper, or both. Financial decisions trade off risk and reward. Make sure your upside reward outweighs your downside risk.

Rajesh Rastogi has been managing and maintaining various learning management system for the past five years. A storehouse of knowledge about e-learning management systems he has been working in close coordination with firm providing elearning solutions.

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