Multicriteria Decision Analysis

Stakeholder technique · See it on the map

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Scoring several options against stated, weighted criteria, so the choice is traceable rather than argued.

When to use it

When choosing among several viable options — vendors, designs, sites — on more than one dimension (cost, risk, capability, schedule) and you need the reasoning to survive being questioned later.

When to avoid it

Skip it for a decision with one obviously dominant option or one overriding constraint — the scoring exercise just launders a call that was already made. And treat with suspicion any use where the criteria and weights were set after the options were already known: weights chosen to fit a preferred answer are justification, not analysis, even though the resulting table looks identical to one honestly built.

Steps

1. Define the criteria that matter to the decision before looking closely at the specific options.
2. Assign each criterion a weight reflecting its relative importance, and agree the weights with stakeholders before scoring begins.
3. Score each option against each criterion using a consistent scale.
4. Multiply each score by its criterion's weight and sum for a total per option.
5. Sanity-check the ranking against intuition — if the top result feels wrong, check whether a criterion is missing or a weight is off, rather than silently overriding the score.

What it produces

• A weighted score for each option, with the weights and criteria on record.
• A ranked list of options traceable to stated priorities rather than to afterward-supplied reasoning.

Common pitfalls

• Setting weights after seeing how the options score, to steer the total toward a preferred outcome — the table format makes this look like analysis even when it's the opposite.
• Choosing criteria that all correlate with each other, so one underlying factor gets counted three or four times under different names.
• Treating the weighted total as a decision rather than an input, and skipping the sanity check when the top-ranked option is surprising.

Worked example

A city is choosing a paving contractor. The procurement team sets criteria — price (40%), prior public-project experience (30%), crew availability in the required window (20%), local references (10%) — and publishes the weights before opening bids. The lowest-price bidder scores second overall once availability and experience are weighted in, and the award goes to the higher-priced bidder with the paper trail to defend it when the losing bidder asks why.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §5.2.2.4

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.