Tools and techniques for decision making- Professional Practices in IT

Effective management of decision logic needs software that supports a wide range of activities like:

• Integrates the system with other applications and services. Properly link business rules to data sources or databases that help business rules to easily access the data available in existing systems and procedures.
• It helps in efficient development and testing of business rules by technical as well as non-technical users. This ensures that all those who are responsible for defining a decision can also assist in writing the business rules.
• Properly identify conflicts related to implementation of business rules, consistency issues, inferior quality and many more issues pertaining to both technical and non-technical users.
• Evaluates of the level of impact of changes to the business rules. Simulation and reporting tools are being used to ensure correctness of the changes that are being made and to learn about the business consequences of the changes
• Performs Deployment of a specified package of business rules to make efficient decisions in a variety of computing environments.
• It also measures and reports the effectiveness of decision and business rules on the basis of the result obtained by executing business rules in decision services.

Successful managers are not just responsible to make effective decisions for their team, project and organization. They analyze an issue and work towards finding the best possible solution for that issue. This helps them make a well-informed decision. They use decision-making tools to make right decisions that are more informed and less based on guesswork. There are variety of decision-making tools available in the market today, but if reputed IT assignment help experts are to be believed then the most common type of decision-making tools observed in most of the IT Industries are –

• The decision tree,
• Payback analysis and
• Simulation.

Let us study each one in detail:

The Decision Tree

One of the industry best professional practices adopted by the most reputed IT companies is the use of decision trees. This tool is specially designed for making effective decisions during the different phases of software development. This tool works by writing down a problem, and come up with raw solutions that appear as branches coming out of the original problem. To implement decision tree, you take a plain piece of paper and make a square box that represents the problem whose solution we have to decide.

As you begin thinking of its possible solutions, you may draw branches as a representation of solutions sprouting out from the box. One can create any number of branches in the decision tree. Decision tree, helps you with a clear understanding of the problem and all the possible measures to resolve them. You can review the solution and add more branches to it till you don’t arrive at any concrete decision.

Precision Tree is a tool that helps you to automate and customize decision tree within Excel using Excel’s inbuilt features. This tree represents uncertain probabilities and payoffs that can occur in decision tree models. This improves the preciseness of decision tree models by considering large ranges of values for probabilities instead of limited discrete values.

Simulation and reporting tools are being used to ensure correctness of the changes

Payback Analysis

This is the second tool used for making decisions for a wide range of functions in an organization. This tool is easier and finite as compared to the decision tree. This tool mainly helps in analyzing monetary investments. When we use this tool, we evaluate an investment and the estimated savings or increase in cost that will generate from that investment. After this evaluation, this payback analysis tool performs calculation of the values and provides a time frame to compensate the money spent in the initial investment. Thus, according to experts of ExpertAssignmentHelp payback analysis tool helps in making a well-informed decision.

Simulation

 Simulation software programs are available which are designed specifically for specific industries. IT Managers can easily use simulation software designed for the use in IT industry. There are various types of software programs available to simulate the uncertainties of events in a given situation. The Simulation tool displays you the different possibilities of output in your Microsoft Excel spread sheet.

It also tells you how frequently they are going to occur. This gives you an understanding of the types of risks you can afford and the ones you should mitigate. Simulation tool is thus an excellent way to predict risk and take preventive measures to eliminate all types of possible risks. These three decision making tools including Simulation tool integrates completely with your Excel spreadsheet.

These tools function similar to true Excel functions, Windows operating system is linked directly to the cells present in your Excel spreadsheet, so the changes you make in one cell gets reflected in other places too. With the feature of call out windows, you can have graphs pointing to the cells of your Excel spreadsheet. The ease of drag and drop functionality, right click menus, and user friendly toolbars helps in better understanding and navigation of these tools. These tools are an integrated set of programs with maximum flexibility that merges with Microsoft Excel easily to provide effective risk analysis and decision making.