Value engineering

July 3, 2009

Last time, my family asked be for my favorites authors in order to make me a gift for my birthday. After an hard reflexion I was able to define a wish list but not to sort this list. What is the ranking between these authors, what are the books I want prior to others…

While thinking to this very important problem, I was remembering a method permitting to take a decision about complex problems by breaking them out into smaller ones easy to solve.

This method is part of the Value engineering and is usually used in IT domain during the Requirements development phase in order to sort requirements by priority. It is specially useful when it is not possible to obtain a consensus.

The method is quite simple:

  • Compare functions by pair and valuate the priority
    • 1: The function is a little more important than the other
    • 2: The function is more important than the other
    • 3: The function is much more important than the other
  • Sum the number of points obtained by each function
  • Compute the distribution of each function and draw a graph

To compare the functions, we will use a matrix . See what is the result with my favorites authors:

Image 1

To build the matrix I have compared each author one by one, starting at the top of the matrix. It is easy for me to take a decision between two authors:

  • Between Balzac and Bernanos, I prefer Bernanos (writting BER) a little, giving a 1 (writting 1)
  • Between Balzac and Boulgakov, I prefer Bernanos (writting BER) a little, giving a 1 (writting 1)
  • Between Balzac and Camus, I prefer Balzac (writting BAL) , giving a 2 (writting 2)

Performing the same comparison for each pair …

At the end of the comparison I make the sum of results obtained by each author and compute the distribution (result for the author on the sum of all results).

Here is the result:

Image 2

So according to this result, my favourites authors are: Conrad, Boulgakov, Bernanos, …

This very useful method permit to obtain a result that cannot be obtained in another way. This is simply done  by breaking a complex problem into several easy to solve comparison.
However, it is tedious to use with a great number of items.

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Posted by Ro