Practical Solutions 5 of 6: Defining a Unified Decision Making Tool

The next confront that faced our Project was to provide business and project managers with an open standard that can help them identify priorities and take decisions in a conscience way. To do so, a unified decision making tool was adopted. It reduced data at hand and enabled trouble-free reporting on performance. The Tool was based upon project measurement capabilities that already existed (Sevick, 2005).
A good example of the unified tool is the APdex formula (Application Performance Index) which sorts the assessment of end user satisfaction in an IT development into three categories:
- No of Satisfied users,
- No of tolerating users,
- No of frustrated users
The Apdex index can then be calculated using the following equation:
APdex = (Satisfied + (tolerating/2))/Total Samples
Developing this index for IT tasks provided senior management with common way to compare performance across all applications. We were then able to identify those practices that need improvements and gauge the effectiveness of improvement practices as well. However we had to factor in the importance of the process itself from a business perspective along with the unified Index.