Working Out the Relative Importance of Different Options.
Paired Comparison Analysis is a good way of weighing up the relative importance of criteria, which may be conflicting. It is useful where you do not have objective data to base this on or when priorities are not clear, or are competing in importance.
Follow these steps to use the technique:
- List the options you will compare as rows AND columns in a table.
- Assign a letter to each option.
- Block out cells on the table where you will be comparing an option with itself or where you will be duplicating a comparison
- Within the remaining cells compare the option in the row with the one in the column. For each cell, write down the letter of the more important option in the cell, and score the difference in importance from 0 (no difference) to 3 (major difference). You can also use 0 to 5 or 0 to 10. .
- Finally, consolidate the results by adding up the total of all the values for each of the options. You may want to convert these values into a percentage of the total score.
Example
A group of marketers wanted to rate the criteria by which they evaluated their brokers.
They agreed the following criteria:
- The size of their business.
- The number of applications they submitted per month (average of the last six).
- How easy they were to work with
- The growth of their business
- Their knowledge of the market
- Their knowledge of the clients products
The grid looked like this:
| Business size (A) | Apps / month (B) | Ease (C) |
Growth (D) |
Market Knwldge (E) | Product Knwldge (F) | |
| Business size (A) |
A,1 | C,4 | D,1 | A,1 | A,2 | |
| Apps / month (B) |
B,2 | B,1 | B,3 | B,1 | ||
| Ease (C) |
D,2 | E,4 | F,2 | |||
| Growth (D) |
D,2 | D,1 | ||||
| Market Knowledge (E) | F,3 | |||||
| Product Knowledge (F) |
Adding up the A, B, C, D, E and F values, gives these totals:
- A = 3
- B = 8
- C = 4
- D = 6
- E = 4
- F = 5
OK in reality I don’t remember the criteria they selected and I have set up the grid so that the weightings aligned with my previous posting on Grid Analysis. But do you get the idea?
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