Reply To 2 Post, In Responding To Discussion:Final Project

Topic – 
 
Now that you have completed your decision matrix, you will discuss your decision-making process and how you have used the matrix. For this discussion, you should NOT post your matrix but rather use it as a tool to evaluate your business. In your initial post, address the following:

Explain how you could use the matrix in a different business/technology scenario. Give an example.
What was the most challenging part of applying this matrix to the final project?
What recommendations would you make to change your project, given some of the challenges you faced?

Respond to two of your peers’ initial posts and consider the following:

How does your decision-making process compare to your peers’ process?

Post 1 –  
Okay, so let’s just say after this week “Decision Matrix” feels like a bad word!  Haha!  I had to read thru and google this concept even though I use decision matrices all the time.  At Microsoft, we call them scorecards.   
One way we used them at work recently was deciding how to gather customer and employee insights during a specific business process (onboarding customer’s to the cloud).  While there are many ways to offer feedback to Microsoft, often in my business area this is passed from consumer to Microsoft representatives verbally.  It is a busy world and often employees would get caught up in helping the next customer and the valuable insights customers were giving us were getting lost.  To combat this a v-Team sat down and brainstormed the problem.  
First, you have to be very precise in what the business problem is and then map that to your expected outcome.  So in our example:
Problem statement:  Customers are giving us valuable feedback directly to our employees but employees do not have the time nor the place to submit these insights.
Next, the problem statement was broken down into business process and technology issues:

“do not have the time” is a business process issue
“place to submit” is a technology issue

Our team then split in two to solve the two issues by creating an expected outcome.  The two outcomes were:

Employees should submit all insights by the end of the week and will be allowed to block off 1 hour on their calendar do complete this business task
A technology will either be used if currently existing, or developed, or purchased to gather and track insights thru its life-cycle

Finally, the technology v-team (the one I was on) created a matrix of potential solutions that addressed the components of our problem:

Insight intake
Insight triage – level 1 (Regional)
Triage Level 2 (Global)
Insight tracking
Escalation
Development Required for software team = yes/no
End-of-life
Feedback to submitter, other stakeholders
Reporting

Using those as the life-cycle for the insights process we then created a matrix–those bullets were the column headers and potential software solutions were the row headers.  And we went thru and debated the pros and cons for each intersection of column and row.  Then a general summary was written up for each potential solution in the final column.  This process was almost identical to the exercise in our final paper.  In the end, it was decided to use SharePoint Online but then customize the OOTB (Out of the Box) tools to facilitate some of the capabilities needed to meet our end goals.  Happy to say, our process scaled and became an enterprise-wide approach to collecting verbal customer insights.  
The decision matrix can be applied to anything in life where a complex problem is broken down into its simple components (Columns) is compared to multiple solutions (Rows).  From deciding which college to attend to what investment strategy you want…the matrix is universal.  I can personally attest to this being a best business practice that I’ve used it several times in my own job.
See…….. “decision matrix” isn’t such a bad word after all!  It was challenging to apply this to our final project because whereas I mostly use the matrix to compare specific technology platforms (SharePoint, Excel, PowerBI, etc), the final seemed to want to zoom out and used the term “technology” to refer to major categories of technology (mobile computing, data analytics, etc).  That seemed a bit broad for a decision matrix as a matrix is much more suited to support specific business case scenarios.  And most people today when they hear the term “technology” think that refers to a specific application or platform, not the broader categorical meaning.
My only recommendation for the final project is to broaden the scenario to be any business circumstance.  Narrowing this down to a small brick and mortar, high-end, clothing retailer was extremely limiting in many ways.  One, this is a dying industry and not applicable to my real world working life whatsoever.  I wish I could have used this assignment to talk about my current job and how this class applies.  All of the same requirements for the paper would be applicable but by using my current role I am directly applying my learning and two, potentially creating something I could show at work.  People at Microsoft love this kind of stuff, drafting solutions, decision matrix, etc.  But since our scenario was so limited in scope, I’m not able to share anything I learned here.  
Another thing is the paper guidance was a bit rough.  I had to download many links and 3 rubrics.  It took a lot of reading and time to fully understand the requirements and in the end, I often felt like I was guessing on what was really needed.  I am definitely guilty of overthinking things but this paper was incredibly specific in the scenario but then relatively vague on how to apply the book learnings.  I, without a doubt, have thoroughly enjoyed this class subject though.  Many terms I learned in this class are used in my work and I had many “aha” moments 🙂

Post 2 – 
 
I had never made a decision matrix prior to this class. The decision matrix was much easier than I thought. At first I was looking it up and researching different examples to only realize that it was much simpler than I was making it. I believe that the decision matrix is used in many companies and is very beneficial. This could be used at any company that has any problems or anything to solve. This could be used at retail stores like Victoria Secret, or any store for that matter. If they wanted new ways to track how much and what the customers were buying they could make a decision matrix. They would put what they need to be made as a decision, and what solutions they could use in order to track what people are buying. They could then write the benefits of each solution and rate them to narrow down how they would want to go about this.  This could be also be used in hospitals to figure out cures for diseases or what treatments they feel are more beneficial for each specific disease. It is much more successful to make decisions based on this matrix rather than on gut feelings. It gives all the possible options to influence your decision.
 The most challenging part of applying this matrix to the final project was deciding what to rank each of the factors. It was hard to choose what technology would be more beneficial to the small business. All the technologies were beneficial but in different ways. They all had the ups and downs so it was challenging to pinpoint which ones should be ranked where. Other than this I think the decision matrix was pretty self-explanatory and it really helped me to choose my final two technologies that I included in my project.
Lastly, the only recommendation that I would make for this project is to not have all the parts listed in the first milestone rubric but rather just have the points that needed to be clarified in the first paper. It was harder for me to focus on only what I needed to write and not the other extra stuff written later on. Other than this I didn’t face any challenges and I thought the project had a great outline and it was broken down into steps. I enjoyed this project.

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