Return on Software: Maximizing the Return on Your Software Investment

Summary

Decisions are easiest when the options represent mutually exclusive courses of action. It's common, however, that the proposals in a business decision aren't mutually exclusive courses of action from the start. There are often important interrelationships, such as mutual exclusion or contingency, between the proposals being considered. This chapter described a systematic process for turning a set of proposals, and any important interrelationships, into mutually exclusive alternatives so that the decision making process will be easier. That systematic process is as follows:

1. Generate all theoretically possible combinations of proposals. With k proposals, there will be 2^k theoretically possible candidate alternatives.

2. Remove the invalid alternatives: ...