What are the stages of decision making

stages of decision making

• Defining the problem.
• Data collection.
• Identify and analyze alternatives.
• Choosing between alternatives.
• taking measures.
• Decision review.

We make dozens of decisions every day in our lives, should we take the bus or the taxi? Tea or coffee? Chocolate or vanilla? Do we eat grilled or fried? Life is a set of decisions that a person makes in his day, but these decisions may be easy and you do not need to think a lot and they do not affect negatively or positively anything, but decisions related to your work or company are completely different from these small decisions, as they affect profit, results and the team To make a good and effective decision, you must follow the steps and stages of decision-making.

Define the problem:  The first step in the decision-making process is to identify the problem that this decision must be made to solve, or what is the purpose of making this decision? And what result do I want to get?

Information gathering:  Once the decision is determined, information must be collected about it in order to make the right decision, by researching the history of your company. Has the company experienced such a problem and what were the decisions at the time? Did anyone try to solve this problem when it happened to the company? After researching the internal sources of your company, you must also search for external sources, as the decision-making process needs a lot of sources. You may talk to a consultant in the field, or do market research.

Identifying and analyzing alternatives:  After collecting information, the decision maker has to identify the decisions that can be taken, usually they are multiple decisions, then these alternatives must be analyzed and how these alternatives will address your problem. Some common analysis methods can be used to analyze decisions by your team such as: SWOT analysis, matrix decisions.

Choosing between alternatives:  Here you and your team actually decide to solve this problem.

Take action:  Once you have made the decision, act now, put together an implementation plan for you and your team and start implementing, as well as evaluation and review plans for implementation.

Decision Review : Take a look at your decision. Did it solve the specific problem? Is it useful for the team? Is his findings bearing fruit or has he not been correct very well.

Decision making

It is the process of choosing a correct path to work on between two or more alternatives to achieve the desired result in the end. All that managers do is make decisions, starting from planning and organizing to directing, coordinating and supervising implementation. All of these stages are making and making decisions. There are decisions to solve problems and there are other decisions. To take advantage of the available opportunities, therefore, decision-making is the essence of the administrative process because it is an integral part of the work of managers to reach the best decisions to implement them, and the more correct the decisions made, the less complexities.

"George Terry" defines the decision-making process as: choosing one alternative behavior between two or more potential alternatives. In other words, we can say that you now have several options on the table to promote an employee and you have three employees in front of you: the first is an employee whose error record is filled with 50%, and the second is a record employee. His mistakes are 25%, and the third employee records his mistakes without a single mistake. You will definitely choose the third employee because he never made a mistake! But as a manager and an expert in management and decision-making, if you decide to go through the stages of decision-making, you will find that how an experienced professional in his work can reach this stage without error one mentioned? Many mistakes indicate the acquisition of skills, the only way to get an error-free record is to do nothing at all!

And we find, “D McFarland” defines the decision as: “The act of choosing between the available alternatives, so the executive officer forms a conclusion about what must be done in a specific case.” The decision-making process is interrelated and its results are interrelated, such as: First: Managers make the decision and begin to implement it based on logic and judgment The conscious, second: the decision is made between a number of possibilities, otherwise what is the use of making a decision if there are no alternatives and it is only one choice!

The importance of decision making

The decision-making process plays a vital and important role in management because the managers carry out a planning process for the goals that the company wants to achieve, the resources that must be used to achieve these goals, and the distribution of tasks to employees and workers, each according to his experience and the department in which he works, so we find that decision-making plays the most important role in operations Planning, management is a package of decision-making processes, the managers of the company have the responsibility to make decisions and to ensure that the decisions taken are carried out in accordance with the objectives and plans set.

Managers most of their work is decision-making, and the quality of these decisions taken by the management affects the effectiveness of the existing plans and the achievement of their goal. Achieves benefit, for example in the process of organization, the manager must make the decision in the organizational structure of the company, the division of labor, procedures, relations, etc. from the organization of the company as a whole, and in the process of coordination, decision-making is very important to provide unity of work between the different departments of the company, for example, he must Coordination between the accounts department and the marketing department, where plans are drawn up by the marketing department for advertisements, and the accounts department decides if these plans are compatible with the company's budget or if they are higher than the budget, so they must be reduced or search for other alternatives in the marketing department.

The successful manager is the one who is able to make the right decision and take it, and in the words of “George Terry” when he said: If there is one universal mark for the manager, it is decision-making. We can see that in profit-making companies, the manager must make and take a wide range of special decisions. Pricing, financial transactions, achieving the best profit for the company, advertising, cost control, capital investments and profit distribution.

Tools to help you make better decisions

• decision tree.
• decision matrix.
• List of pros and cons.

Decision Tree  : When making a decision, you go through the stage of evaluating the alternatives. The decision tree is one of the means that may help you in evaluating each alternative, its final results, and preference among them.

Decision Matrix : It is a tool that helps business owners and decision-makers evaluate the options and alternatives before them in order to reach a correct decision-making.

List of pros and cons : You can identify the pros and cons of each alternative and evaluate if its negatives are more than positive or vice versa, or you can set the pros and cons as a rule and evaluate the alternatives on the basis of it.