I was working as a manager at Storage Technology Corp. and we had an annual forecasting of employee ratings. I had rated, or better ranked, the folks working under me. My peers had done likewise. Then we were challenged by the executive manager over us all to merge our rankings to come up with
an overall organization ranking.

All the managers were cavalier about their own employees with their personal goal to advance the rankings of their own over others. This became contentious and frustrating. Finally I suggested defining the attributes that we sought
in our employees and then we ranked them in order of importance. We used this filter then to look at each of our employees and rate them. The overall ranking then proceeded efficiently and, I believe, effectively. The ranking became more objective and the contentious feelings subsided.

Thus focusing on the project vision, identifying and enumerating critical criteria, and finally prioritizing and ranking the judgment criteria (Key Process Input Variables to our decision model) will improve the decision process and render the decisions more reliable, measurable and tractable.

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Sam :--)