6 Effective Business Tools for Decision Making
When faced with the prospect of making decisions, it is always useful to seek assistance from appropriate decision-making tools and applications. Tools for making decisions can relieve the pressure on business leaders that have to make hundreds of decisions every single day. While many of these decisions influence the success of the business, business tools for decision-making that you can find on the market can enhance your ability to make efficient, effective, and informed business decisions. In this post, we will be recommending some of the most widely-used and critically-acclaimed decision-making tools that are ready to fit your short and long-term business strategies and planning operations.
What are Decision-Making Tools Used for?
Decision-making tools online are software apps that enable you to determine all the possible alternatives and options before making a decision. The decision-making tools for managers that we are about to unravel will come in handy by simplifying the rather complex decision-making process and creating various diagrams to help you visualize your decision-making steps. Here are some of the most popular decision-making tools you may currently find and choose from depending on your specific decision-making needs and methods.
Lucidchart
Lucidchart is one of the top tools that companies opt for when choosing between team-oriented tools for decision-making. It helps build effective decision tree diagrams that, in real-time, can be used to collaborate with your teammates. Decision-making diagrams help you map out the decision you have taken and are one of the best decision-making methods used at the managerial level. This type of graph also helps you estimate eventual actions based on potential outcomes and foreseeable risks. Therefore, Lucidchart and its technical diagrams are mostly used for planning team strategies. You can also benefit from Lucidchart when you and your team want to examine specific outcomes and visualize potential roadmaps.
Creately
An easy way to create a SWOT diagram online, Creately is also one of the most trending quantitative tools for decision-making you can find on the market. A SWOT analysis refers to the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats that a process, a project, or in our case, a decision, can behold. SWOT analyses and diagrams serve as a basic guide for strategic planning. Creately contains hundreds of ready-made SWOT analysis templates and comes with a user-friendly interface that allows you to customize each diagram. Creately also serves as a collaborative strategic tool that can be used in real-time as well.
Visual Paradigm
This tools helps you add data to your Pareto chart easily. A Pareto Analysis is another way of decision-making, which is also known as the 80/20 rule. This rule means that 20% of your activities account for 80% of your results. Pareto is mostly used for prioritizing potential changes by detecting the most critical problems and resolving them. In order to perform an effective Pareto Analysis on your various strategies, you can get assistance from the Visual Paradigm tool that enables you to generate a chart based on the data available on Google Sheets. You can also change chart fonts and colors easily and resize the chart’s dimensions without any hassle.
SmartDraw
SmartDraw can both be used for Ishikawa diagrams and Force Field Analysis, both are which very important to a business decision-making process. An Ishikawa diagram is basically a cause-and-effect analysis that shows the causes of a particular facility. This type of diagram can be used in product design, where you can check the product’s quality and identify any possible factors that may cause an overall effect on the product. You can also use this diagram to group causes into various categories and find variation sources quickly. With SmartDraw, this cause-and-effect diagram turns into a piece of cake, and you can draw Ishikawa diagrams on your PC or online using a web browser. While SmartDraw provides support for both Windows and Mac users, it automatically integrates cause and effect diagrams, which helps you move or delete them in seconds.
A Force Field Analysis, on the other hand, enables you to fully examine your project from A to Z. It provides a comprehensive framework for determining the factors that have an effect on a particular event. It also helps you understand the process of any organization in a much more efficient way. One of the best decision-making tools out there, SmartDraw provides countless templates that allow you to perform force field analysis. You can use it to for making decisions, as well as importing or exporting your force field analysis diagrams from Visio.
Cascade Strategy
Speaking of decision-making tools and techniques, a strategy map is a must when it comes to landing on healthy and long-time effective decisions. A strategy map is a diagram that documents strategic business goals and is usually created during the planning process. Cascade Strategy, one of the most popular decision-making tools in business, helps you build a strong strategy map using its user-friendly interface and choose from a wide rand of frameworks that you can ultimately export to a PDF file format. You can also easily drag and drop various sections of your map to alternate between various strategic decisions, review, and check-in on your meetings, and create an overall strategic plan to present to your fellow colleagues.
Huudle
Even with using these tools and enhancements in the industry, decision-making can still turn into a demanding and complicated process, during which the company is bound to be affected by this reluctant cumbersomeness. A new and effective tool in decision-making, Huudle is an up-and-coming application that allows your team to basically “huddle” and make fast, effective, and collective decisions.
