FAQ type: Decision Making

Yes, a decision can be revised or re-used at any time.  You can revise, add, and remove criteria and reprioritize them. You can also revise, add, and remove alternatives and re-score them. This may save you some work if you have to make similar decisions in the future.

When you sign up for Definitive Choice®, you receive a 1-month free trial to use the software before you will be offered an opportunity to subscribe to the service. Any decision that you set up or make during that trial period will be carried over to your subscription.

The Starter plan is free and enables a user to make up to 2 decisions, with up to 5 participants in each decision. A Basic subscription for a single user is $15 per month, or $180 per year if purchased on an annual basis. Pro subscriptions are $20 per month, or $240 per year. Business accounts allow the creation and sharing of decision templates and provide insights into how business users make decisions. Please contact us for business account pricing.

Definitive Choice® provides an easy-to-understand bar chart to depict the relative importance of the decision criteria, and a stacked bar chart depicting outcomes of the alternative scoring. In addition, the service provides a downloadable decision report (.pdf) with all the analysis and the details of the information that was entered to make your decision.

Entering the cost is optional, but we recommend that you add it if it’s available. We strongly discourage creating criteria to factor in cost, because cost (or the lack thereof) is not a benefit unto itself. By entering the cost for each alternative, you will be able to keep your criteria focused on the benefits that contribute to your decision goal, and as a result, be able to compare the benefit and the cost of the alternatives after they have been evaluated. This will enable you to see which alternative provides the best value (benefit/cost). This technique is known as treating “cost as an independent variable (CAIV)” and is a best practice in multi-criteria decision-making. In situations where you do not know the cost, but you have a general sense of how the cost of the alternatives may compare to each other, then you may want to consider adding a cost criterion. In this case, higher ratings would be selected for the lower cost alternatives.

A decision template is used to set up and structure decisions for your users. Definitive Choice® provides many options when creating a template. For example, you can add the criteria that you want them to use and can set each criterion as mandatory or optional. You can also enable users to add their own criteria or limit them to use the ones that you provide.

Like criteria, you can add the alternatives that you want the users to evaluate and can set each alternative as mandatory or optional. You can also enable users to add their own alternatives or limit them to use the ones that you provide. You can add alternatives scoring data/metrics that you want to make available to the users.

Finally, you allow or limit the ability for users to invite other participants.

Definitive Choice® can be used for any multi-criteria decision that adheres to our guidelines (see below). As soon as you login, you can begin using the service to set up decisions. Our guidelines are as follows: Definitive Choice® must be used to make legal and constructive decisions, with no intention of harming anyone. The criteria and alternatives entered into the service must not be offensive. Definitive Business Solutions has the sole discretion to make this determination. Any content that does not adhere to these guidelines will result in account termination.

Criteria are measures that are important to making the decision. Often, these are the benefits that you are trying to obtain by making the best decision.

For example, if you are buying a car, your criteria may include fuel efficiency, seating capacity, and color. Some criteria may be very quantitative like fuel efficiency (expressed in miles per gallon or miles between charges), while others are very qualitative like color. One of the strengths of Definitive Choice® is that you can use both types of criteria when setting up your decision, and the results will be synthesized into a total score for each alternative.