Business Decision Making

Introduction

Thinking critically and making decisions are important parts of today’s business environment. It is important to understand how the decision making process works and the steps involved. The nine steps of the decision making process are: identifying the problem, defining criteria, setting goals and objectives, evaluating the effect of the problem, identifying the causes of the problem, framing alternatives, evaluating impacts of the alternatives, making the decision, implementing the decision, and measuring the impacts. (Decision, 2007.) By using various methods and tools to assist in making important business decisions an individual can ensure the decisions they make will be as successful as possible. In this paper it will be examined how the decision making process can be followed using various tools and techniques to make successful business decisions by using these same tools and techniques during a thinking critically business scenario. The paper will also discuss how different tools and techniques could have been used to make different, yet still successful decisions.

The techniques of the stimulation gave an outline of achieving the companies goal to identifying the problems, how to fix the problems and implementation. The criteria matrix was the technique used to identify the problems. The criteria matrix provided a simply way of prioritizing, organization, and sorting out issues into categories deemed critical or non-critical and whether each on was urgent or non-urgent. This was also a controlled way of making deciding what the problem was because you had all the information to start making decisions. This technique helped determine the criticality of the issues, from identifying the problem to evaluating the decision process with looking at many matrixes faced in the store.

A decision making worksheet helped to ensure we used critical thinking throughout the entire process, from framing the problem to making the decision to evaluating the decision. When we came up with a decision to fix a problem the stimulation had a visual graph to use that examined different metrics of how our choices affected sales, workers, the cost and the company and whether the decisions would be successful or unsuccessful. This visually allowed us to see the outcomes to our decisions and gives us more experience for the future decisions and way to succeed in our goals.

All the techniques assisted in following the decision making steps including measuring the impact which is easily forgotten. It is very important to ensure our decision was effective and if it was not. Understanding why the decision was not effective and re evaluating the alternatives and the issues that come into play will help us identify what was missed or overlooked so the problem can get fixed. This also helps ensure the same mistakes are minimized, if not identified so the same issues do not reoccur and something can be learned for the future.

The techniques of the stimulation measured the success of change and it provided feedback