The Facilitated Decision-Making Process - Optioneering

Managers in business and industry often have to make major decisions on the basis of multiple, and sometimes conflicting, criteria. These decisions may have major financial, environmental and safety implications. They may have to be justified to providers of finance, government regulators and a concerned public. A decision making process which is properly structured, disciplined and documented enables optimal decisions to be made and fully justified.

NUKEM’s trained and experienced facilitators and their specialist software complement our customers’ technical and management expertise. They provide a structured and guiding framework for the decision making process and the impartial, independent management of it.

The Role of the Facilitator

The NUKEM facilitator manages the overall process and plays a direct role in the initial brainstorming and the options evaluation workshop. This has key benefits including:

• Looking at the project with a fresh perspective
• Questioning the basic assumptions of the project team
• Broadening the thinking of those involved to ensure all valid options are considered
• Moving the process forward at the pace required
• Avoiding undue emphasis being placed on a limited number of factors
• Avoiding the discussion focussing on detail, where it is not required
• Allowing the project team to concentrate on the key issues such as technical options, and regulatory and financial limitations, without needing to worry about the mechanics of the decision making

The Decision Process

The facilitated decision making process enables robust decisions to be made, even where there are information deficits. The process:

• Is structured
• Considers all relevant issues
• Is transparent and auditable to those involved and to others
• Is efficient in itself and enables future effort to be focused on the most promising options

The process typically includes four stages:

• Possible options
• Evaluation criteria
• Objectives and constraints

• Screen out options which do not meet decision constraints
• Rationalise evaluation criteria

• Simple flow diagram
• Estimates of quantitative data (waste volumes etc)

• Identify crucial information deficits preventing a robust decision
• Assess each option against each criterion
• Compare options with the aid of multi-attribute decision software
• Review sensitivity of evaluation to individual criteria

The process may yield a single preferred option or lead to more detailed consideration of several options.

The “facilitated optioneering” process can be applied to a range of problems:

• A BPEO (Best Practical Environmental Option) study will focus on the environmental impact of different options, and the issues that affect the practicability of the decision.
• A strategy decision-making process will address only the high level, over-arching issues and not consider the detailed engineering at all.
• A design option study, where the scope will be much more focussed, looking at a narrower range of issues but looking at those issues more thoroughly.

The exact nature of the process can be tailored to suit the nature of the decision, the needs of the client and any regulatory requirements.

The output of the process is a comprehensive report which sets out the advantages and disadvantages of each option and the process by which they have been assessed.

A client’s decision making team may have adequate skilled resources to generate options and the data needed to evaluate them. However, NUKEM has a wide range of skilled and experienced consultants and leading experts in:

• Process engineering
• Nuclear waste management and processing
• Decontamination and decommissioning
• Land remediation
• Safety
• Regulation
• Environmental protection

Our consultants are very often called upon to supplement customers’ resources.

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Click here if you would like more information on our Optioneering and Facilitator Services.