Selection and planning problems pose significant difficulties for decision makers. While it may be easy to identify the direct material and labor costs associated with programs, quantifying the (often intangible) benefits, competitive advantages, and opportunity costs presents a difficult problem.
Executives forced to justify programs and projects on the basis of avoided costs and direct costs often find that traditional ROI calculations fail to provide the financial justification to move forward. If executives do move forward on the basis of intuition and traditional planning methods, they may possess limited understanding of the risk factors that can cause budget, schedule, and requirements failures.
These situations result in many valuable initiatives being adopted that should be abandoned (or vice versa), never ending cycles of analysis and rework, and lingering doubts about the value of newly proposed or ongoing efforts.
Our services are designed especially for executives in large to mid-sized companies facing tough decision problems who want to gain greater clarity in the moment of decision. We stand behind you to "count the cards," to help you understand the odds you face at the business table.
Read more to learn about the science behind how we help you.
Blind Me With ScienceIncite! takes a different approach to risk management than is usually associated with common practices. Risk management to us is really decision management - supported by decision analysis. Of the several key insights that decision analysis delivers, value of information and value of control are two of the most powerful.
The value of information (VOI) tells us the most we should budget to acquire more precise information in order to make a clear decision. For this reason, some people refer to it as the value of clairvoyance. It is essentially the value of obtaining better information, not just more (typically useless) information.
The value of control (VOC) tells us the most we should spend in order to get a desired outcome by controlling what was otherwise a critical uncertainty. It is the cost to turn critical uncertainties (which expose us to risk or regret) into decisions under our control. For this reason, some refer to it as the value of wizardry.
The following vignettes describe how clients benefited directly from such analysis.
Show Me the EvidenceA major petroleum exploration & production company wanted to reduce the capital cost of an ERP system rollout in order to justify the net economic value, which was originally judged to be $0 (yeah!) on a spend of $100M (oh yeah!). Critical uncertainty analysis showed that the areas targeted for capital cost reduction would actually destroy the value of the system further. VOC analysis showed that spending additional capital in those same areas could provide an additional $300M of opportunity value. |
A product development company believed they needed to control the cost of R&D on all projects as a means to improve the value of the company through improvements in capital efficiency. For a new product under consideration, VOI analysis revealed that practically all the effort for improving the contribution to value should be placed in understanding some essential market parameters (e.g., actual market size, potential market penetration, and time on max penetration). In other words, instead of spending resources on an immediately tangible, but ineffective, area of control, VOI analysis showed what the maximum budget should be for understanding the target market better and how much that better understanding was worth. Spending resources to reduce R&D was like looking for a lost quarter under the street lamp, although ten dollars had been lost over in the dark bushes. |
The leadership of a new technology company estimated they needed ~$500K of start-up capital. Our decision analysis showed that this level of capitalization bought about a 30% chance of success, while ~$2.5M bought about a 90% chance of success. The company underestimated their required capital by ~5X! Furthermore, VOC analysis showed...
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If you face any situation like these in which the amount of capital you need is uncertain, what the ROI will be for deploying it, and the possibility that your objectives are not aligned to create success...
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