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6. The Criteria Smry Sheet

Pdf Copy of Criteria Smry sheet for Zooming Reading Convenience

Subsequent subsets charts of the Criteria Smry sheet will be more readable in Sections 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4.

6.0 Why a Smry Sheet?

In order to explain the Criteria Smry Sheet effectively it is best to use a specific example and the first Case History's Smry has been chosen. But before getting into specifics, it is best to discuss what is needed by the Criteria Smry Sheet to supplement the services provided by the Vectorgrams.

When an analytic comparison is started, the first task is to organize the criteria, that will be needed to test the Alternative candidates and with the help of the V(ma) software put them into a hierarchy.

The tasks to accomplish that were described in section 5. “The Hierarchy of Criteria.
A summary of those tasks are:

1. Selecting the top priorities and exploding them using Nodes and EndPoints until a Criteria Hierarchy has been established,

2. Assigning the Weights of Importance

3. Ensuring that those responsible for evaluating the Alternatives against the Criteria are comfortable with the Comparative Domain definition, specifications and Percentages of Contribution for every Entity and finally

4. Ensuring that those responsible for making the final decision, have been briefed on the Hierarchy, the Weights of Importance and the Percentages of Contribution and have been assured that all those who are to be involved in the evaluations are in agreement with the Hierarchical Domain's priority levels and Contribution Percentages.

Once that is done, there is now a hierarchical two dimensional array of Nodes and EndPoints whose priorities and weights have produced Percentages of Contribution that represent a Profile of Criteria EndPoints which will be used by the evaluating teams to score the individual Alternatives.

Those scores will be processed by the V(ma) software to produce scores for all of the Nodes up through the Hierarchy to the top Node ‘s final scores for each Alternative.
V(ma) will also generate a database of Vectorgrams and construct a Criteria Smry sheet.

The generated Vectorgrams will provide a VectorSting view of how each Alternative faired against the other Alternatives within each Node. And querying individual Vectors will enable the observers to look within the various spreadsheets to obtain whatever details they need.

What’s next is the Criteria_Smry_Sheet which I affectionately call, “ The Partner of the Vectorgrams”,

Once the observer has browsed through the Vectorgrams and has seen which Alternatives are the strongest contenders, it is time to reverse the rolls and use the Criteria_Smry_Sheet to see the Alternatives from a different perspective. In so doing, there will be occasions when the observer will want to see a Criteria EndPoint in the context of its Parent Node’s Vectorgram. That will be done easily because of Vector links between the Vectorgrams and the Smry sheet.

In the Vectorgram browse, the focus is a top down surveillance of the Hierarchy and the entities being viewed are Nodes and their subcomponents. The browsing from one Node to the other is accomplished by clicking the Vectors to move up or down the hierarchical lattices. And, by the end of the browsing, the observer will know which Alternative has the top score and which Alternatives are the close runner ups.

The opposite approach is taken by the Criteria_Smry_sheet (or the "Smry" for short).

The Smry takes a "Chart of Accounts" approach and focuses on the EndPoint “Leaves” of the Hierarchy’s “Tree”.

In most projects, on average, there are two to three EndPoint Criteria for every Node. Also, the Percentages of Contribution for those EndPoints will be extremely different from those of their unweighted status. For example, in the first Case History, there are 49 EndPoints and 23 Nodes. Without any priority or weighting processing, each of those 49 EndPoints would have a contribution of 1/49th or 2.04%. and an Alternative’s score would simply be the normal Average of the 49 scores for each Alternative.

In the Smry, the 49 Criteria EndPoints are sorted by their Contribution %’s and then assigned to one of four Quadrants of Importance. Each Quadrant is assigned as many Criteria as it takes for the sum of their percentages to be as close to 25% as possible. .

In the first Case History, Quad I got 4 Criteria for 25% with and average of 6.2% contribution.
Quad II got 7 Criteria for 24%, with and average of 3.4% contribution.
Quad III got 11 Criteria for 24,4% with and average of 2.2% contribution.
Quad IV got 27 Criteria for 26.5% with and average of 1.0% contribution.

Since all four Quadrants have approximately 25% contributions,
Quad I with only 4 of the top Criteria,,
Quad II with only 7 Criteria and
Quad III with only 11 Criteria
each have the same % of contribution toward the total score as
Quad IV does with 27 of the least important Criteria!
.
What does this tell us?
Certainly the more favored Criteria represent the priority of the decision maker. But it does raise an eyebrow. All four Quadrants in the final analysis must be examined carefully to ensure the decision maker doesn’t select an Alternative with good scores for the favorite Criteria in the top Quads, only to have mediocrity lurking in the lower Quads. (One doesn’t want that shiny red convertible to loose its transmission in the first year.)
.
The Smry sheet then, is a second approach for evaluating the Alternatives’ scores.
It is divided into three Parts.
1. The Lower Left is called, "The Criteria Smry EndPoints"
2. The Top is called, "The Criteria Smry Four Quadrant Report Card"
and
3. The Lower Right is called, "The Criteria Smry Alternatives' What If Histogram".

6.1 The Criteria Smry EndPoints

This Section focuses on the Criteria EndPoints; what their Contribution Percentages are, which Quadrant they are in, their Weights of Importance, their Parent Nodes and the actual numerical value each of one of them contributed to the Winner’s score. i.e. The Winning Alternative's individual parts are put on display
(49 in the first Case History's example).

6.2 The Smry Four Quadrant Report Card

The Section is a review of the performances of the Alternatives for each of the four Quadrants of Importance to enable the viewer to see any imbalances of strengths across the four of them by focusing on:
1. The statistics of each Quadrant,
2. The scores of each Quadrant for each of the Alternatives,
3. The total scores for all four Quadrants for each Alternative which must match the total scores for each Alternative derived by the Main Spreadsheet and shown in the Top Vectorgram.
4.The Standard Deviation of the Endpoints’ scores for every Alternative to show their consistency, of lack of it.
5.The total scores for all four Quadrants for each Alternative before any hierarchical prioritizing or weighting, sometimes called, the "Completely Unwgt'd" and
6. A comparison between the Naked and Weighted scores to see how each Alternative weathered the scoring.

The goal here is to
1.Check each Quadrant for weaknesses that might be concealed by higher scores elsewhere in the other Quadrants. and
2.To sound the alarm on those Alternatives with that problem. It is not enough to see the strengths of the few most important Criteria in Quadrant I, only to miss the mediocrity somewhere in the midst’s of the lower Quadrants. This is significant and the task of the Smry is to flag that condition during this review.

The following figure is an example of The Criteria Smry Four Quadrant Report Card.

1.CapeCod won Quads I and II. Contemp won Quad III and tied with Maine for Quad IV.
2 .Cape Cod won the four Quadrants total with a score of 4.11 and also won the prioritized unwgt'd score of 4.07 and the total of the raw scores of the Endpoints, 3.94. Thus, the total scores of CapeCod show a harmony with the Profile of the customer by responding positively to the prioritizing effect of the Hierarchy and doing so again with the Weights of Importance specified by the customer.
3. CapeCod and Contemp both had small STDEV's of 0.83 and 0.84 while Maine had 1.32 indicating less consistency.
4. The completely unwgt'd percent of contribution for the 49 Criteria Endpoints is 2.0%
5. The number of Nodes of 23 is displayed in Part 1

6.3 The Smry “What If” Histogram

This review consists of a colored histogram using numerical columns that show
1. which Alternative had the top score,
2. how the runner-ups scores compare to those of the winner’s and
3. just as important, what Criteria scores of the losers, if fixed, would cause the losing Alternatives to match the score of the winning Alternative.

It is side by side review of all the Alternatives using a colored set of Histogram (numerical) columns to show the performance of each Alternative against each of the Criteria EndPoints.
.
A “What if “check is done to determine what the losing Alternatives would have to improve to match or beat the winner’s score. This provides two benefits.

1. Those who are champions of one Alternative in particular are shown which EndPoint performances must be improved to make their Alternative the winner.
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2. Those who are unbiased but want to find any flaws that might be constraining a fair analysis.
.
For example, if the Criteria that needs to be to fixed happens to be a “soft Criteria” and possibly negotiable, then the scores, for the Alternative’s involved, should possibly be re-examined by the evaluators to ensure that the scores for that Criteria have been carefully examined and possibly already negotiated for their maximum potential. If that is the case, then there should be an Excel Comment flag in the cell containing that Alternative’s score with a note.
.
The following figure is an example of a Smry “ What If” Histogram. There is a slight overlap between it and Part 1 in that they share, side by side, the contributions of every EndPoint toward the scoring of the Winning Alternative as well as the names of the winning Alternatives for each Criteria EndPoint.

6.4 The Smry “BlackBoard” Text Boxes

The purpose of the Criteria Smry sheet is to produce a summary of the scoring that can be used as part of an affidavit audit of the comparative analysis. In addition to the Criteria Smry Sheet the audit will contain the same files that can be found for each Case History. The 8th Webpage of this website contains 16 Case Histories. With this in mind, one more feature was added to the Criteria Smry sheet.

In anticipation of the Smry being shared with others, three "BlackBoard" text boxes have been included in the Criteria Smry Sheet. They are: 1. The Quadrant Smry 2. The Weighting Smry and 3. The What IF Smry.

The following troika of text boxes contain the original text for each text box when a Criteria_Smry_Sheet is first produced. They contain instructions regarding each of the three parts of the Smry.

Quads_Default_Smry

Wgt_d_Default_Smry

What_If_Default_Smry

The next troika of text boxes contain the Smry texts for the Criteria_Smry_Sheet of the 1st Case History, "A Comparison of Vacation Homes". The texts are short observations of each Part of the Smry Sheet which normally would be prepared by the analyst and senior manager

Quads_Smry

Wgt_d_Smry

What_If_Smry

These BlackBoard comments can be edited to suit the observer's taste and if necessary there can be more that one text box should it be required. The only limit is the text boxes must be inside the black shaded area of the Criteria_Smry_Sheet. Also, once the text has been inserted the observer inserts the term "Save Notes in the left hand corner of the Part 2 partition. And should the Criteria Smry Sheet be recalculated, the V(ma) software will insert the saved Observer's notes.

Each Case History Excel workbook also includes a sheet labeled, "Introduction" and there is a single BlackBoard text box which contains all the individual Smry BlackBoard texts from the Criteria Smry sheet. The Introduction has a few features for those not familiar with V(ma) which enables the reader to see all the pertinent Vectorgrams and spreadsheets that should be reviewed.







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