Law Department Management Blog
Grid Analysis (also known as Decision Matrix Analysis, Pugh Matrix Analysis or MAUT, which stands for Multi-Attribute Utility Theory) is a useful technique to use for making a decision. I have paraphrased the following description from the excellent MindTools website. Grid analysis is particularly powerful where you have a number of good alternatives to choose from, and many different factors to take into account. A law department might use it when choosing a matter management system or as part of a competitive bidding process for outside counsel.
The technique starts by you listing your options as rows on a table, and the factors you need consider as columns. You then score each option/factor combination, weight this score, and add these scores up to give an overall score for the option.
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List all of your options as the row labels on a spreadsheet, and list the factors that you need to consider as the column headings.
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Next, work out the relative importance of the factors in your decision. Show these as numbers from, say, 0 to 5, where 0 means that the factor is absolutely unimportant in the final decision, and 5 means that it is very important. (It’s perfectly acceptable to have factors with the same importance.) We will use these to weight your preferences by the importance of the factor.
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The next step is to work your way down the columns of your table, scoring each option for each of the factors in your decision. Score each option from 0 (poor) to 5 (very good). Note that you do not have to have a different score for each option – if none of them are good for a particular factor in your decision, then all options should score 0.
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Now multiply each of your scores from step 3 by the values for relative importance you calculated in step 2. This will give you weighted scores for each option/factor combination.
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Finally, add up these weighted scores for each of your options. The option that scores the highest wins!