W5_MA_project development team

Problem Definition

In the company for each specific project a team of advisors will be hired to undertake the project through the project development stage. The project development team consist of three smaller teams of advisors which are legal, technical and financial team. The advisory team typical are hired through tendering process and for the project development period (which is typically 18 months). In this blog, the feasible alternative options for hiring advisors will be investigated using Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM).

 Identify the Feasible Alternative

In this investigation three feasible alternative options which are taking as case study as following:

1.       Hiring a set of advisory teams (as typically done)

2.       Hiring permanent employees

3.       Hiring temporary employees

Development of the Outcome for Alternative

For this investigation Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) will be used. “Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) involves making preference decisions (such as evaluation, prioritization, selection) over the available alternatives that are characterized by multiple, usually conflicting, attributes” [1]. The Simple Additive Weighting scoring method will be used in this MADM process. The Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) method is probably the best known and most widely used MADM method.  

Selection Criteria

The three options can be ranked based on five given criteria’s as shown in Table 1.

	Advisory team	Permanent employees	Temporary employees
Cost	high	low	medium
Experience	high	low	medium
Quality	high	low	low
Market image	high	low	low
exposure	high	low	medium

Table 1

Analysis and Comparison of the Alternative

The scores in table 1 could be represented as numbers that could be used to rank the options as shown in table 2 below.

	Advisory team	Permanent employees	Temporary employees
Cost	1	3	1
Experience	3	1	2
Quality	3	1	1
Market image	3	1	1
exposure	3	1	2
Total	13	7	7

Table 2

Selection of the Preferred Alternative

From table 2, the results show that hiring advisory team would provide the most convenient option (out souring the project development team). The cost is the only disadvantage with the advisory team. The average cost of an advisory team for any project is around 500,000 OMR. The cost of the other options is much less than the advisory team. However, the success of the project would require all the other values in the project team members especially the market image of the team which give the confident to the bidders to participate in the tending of the project and this brings more and better economic profits from the project.

Performance Monitoring and the Post Evaluation of Result

Each of these elements that have a major effect on the project follow. The value of each one would require more detail study and this would be project specific details, as there might be a team in the company that have good value in each element in that project.

[1] F. S. Azar, 2000, Retrieved from { http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1121&context=cis_reports }

[2] K. Anupama, S. Gowri, B. Rao, and P. Rajesh, “Application of madm algorithms to network selection”, International Journal of Innovative Research in Electrical, Electronics, Instrumentation and Control Engineering, Vol.3, Issue 6, pp. 64-67, 2015.

[3] GUILD OF PROJECT CONTROLS COMPENDIUM and REFERENCE (CaR) | Project Controls - planning, scheduling, cost management and forensic analysis (Planning Planet). Retrieved from { http://www.planningplanet.com/guild/gpccar/managing-change-the-owners-perspective }