Choosing or weighing alternative solutions

In innovative design projects, during the functional analysis phases and as part of a value analysis approach, you will often find yourself comparing alternatives such as innovative solution concepts, or assigning a weight (a percentage of importance) to usage situations, service functions or customer segments for your product or service. It's a question of determining a set of weights or choosing a better alternative.

So-called "cross-sorting" techniques exist and are quite commonly used by practitioners to determine weights. You may even use software to help you generate weights or prioritize the importance of solutions or functions. But beware of these "cross-sorting" techniques, as they distort expert opinion and can lead to erroneous results. Yet simple, accurate methods, just as easy to use as an Excel® spreadsheet, exist and have been known for forty years. They are known as "pairwise comparisons", and are at the advent of multi-criteria decision support (MCDS) as a field of study.

This sheet is designed to help you :

• understand why cross-sorting methods are wrong ;

• check that your software uses the correct weighting method ;

• propose two simple pairwise comparison methods;

• practice the method using examples and an initial Excel spreadsheet.