Weighted Ranking

The benefits of weighted ranking are to ensure that the solution that is chosen to a problem is not a knee jerk reaction based off of what appears to be the best decision from examining only the top layer of the criteria. Weighted ranking first makes the decision maker consider all criteria, rank the criteria and then use the top ranking criteria to be considered in the weighted ranking of solutions. This method ensures that the most important criteria are considered.

Table 1 below lists the criteria that I believe that the best solution to my problem should entail. After establishing the criteria, I ranked them from zero to five with five being the most important.

Table 1

Criteria Votes from Pair Ranking

Overhead cost 4

Time table 1

Team morale 2

Client response 3

Ease of solution 0

Effectiveness 5

After establishing the importance of each of the criteria, I selected the three most important criteria and inserted them into my weighted ranking table. The weighted ranking table is shown in Table 2 below. I also assigned a weight to each of the criteria based on how important they are.

After the criteria and associated weights were established, I began to pair-rank the solutions based on each of the criteria. My pair-rankings began based on effectiveness and pair ranked solution 1 to solution 2, then solution 1 to solution 3, etc. After the pair-rankings were complete, they were totaled and multiplied by the assigned weight for that criterion. This process was then repeated for the other two criteria. Once all pair-rankings were complete, they were totaled up in the “Total Votes” column. The solution with the most total votes is then deemed to be the top ranking solution and the solution with the least amount of votes is deemed to be the least desirable solution.

Table 2

Criteria