Prioritising Options in Problem Solving

Now that you are familiar with the brainstorming and ideation process to analyse a possible set of solutions to a given problem, it is time to narrow down and prioritise the solutions that seem the most effective. This can be a bit of a challenge for you, but our subject-matter expert, Prashanth Balasubramanian, is here to help you. In the next video, he will introduce you to two of the most commonly used techniques to prioritise solutions:

That was an insightful video. Prashanth introduced you to two of the most widely used techniques to prioritise solutions and elucidated them to you with the help of some simple examples and illustrations. Now, let’s recap your key takeaways from this segment:

• To narrow down a long list of solutions to a shorter one that you want to take a look at more deeply, you need to prioritise solutions using a technique called funnel
• To prioritise the solutions further from the narrower list, you need to use a 2x2 prioritisation matrix
• Therefore, to put it more precisely, the two most common ways of prioritising solutions are as follows:
  • Funnel: It can be defined as a process of narrowing down solutions that are identified using hard constraints to determine whether a solution or an option is liable to be considered or not.
  • 2x2 prioritisation matrix: It is a method of prioritising solutions using soft factors. It has four quadrants and two axes. On the X-axis is the importance of the solution and on the Y-axis is the ease of its implementation. The option that falls in the upper-right quadrant is high on both importance and ease and is to be prioritised. 
• Prashanth talked about the hard constraints that are used to determine whether an option can be considered or not in the funnel process of prioritising solutions. These constraints can be qualitative as well as quantitative in nature. Let’s summarise them:

• Now, let’s look at some factors that help determine the importance of a solution. They are as follows:
  • Value of opportunity
  • Profit margin
  • Growth rate
  • Impact time
• The factors that help in determining the ease of implementation of a solution are as follows:
  • Cost of implementation
  • Effort in implementation
  • The risk associated with the implementation
  • The time required to implement it

Until now, the subject-matter expert helped you understand the ideation and prioritisation stages of the problem-solving approach. In the next segment, he will talk about how to evaluate the implications of problem-solving in a business context