Whenever I am faced with too many alternatives and feel lost about what I'm supposed to do, I turn to this book by Sam Deep and Lyle Sussman called Smart Moves. It's filled with tons and tons of lessons on management.
1. Perform a situation analysis. - Check for trends and conditions. Identify what is exactly giving rise to the need for a decision.
2. Determine the decision objective. - What are the why's? What do you hope to gain?
3. Quantify expected results. - If you make the decision, what new conditions will arise and ask if those are desirable for you. You must try to evaluate the quality of a decision with a quantified target.
4. Identify available information. - Garbage in, garbage out. The quality of your decision is as good as the quality of information going into that decision.
5. Identify other resources. - Which are available? Which can you generate more of if necessary? Where will you look and by when?
6. Establish decision requirements. - What are the conditions that must be met before you can make a decision?
7. Determine desirable features. - If decision requirements are the "musts" ; desirable features are the "wants."
8. Rate desirable features. - Not all wants have the same level of importance.
9. Generate alternatives. - What are other available choices?
10. Test alternatives. - Measure each alternative against your list of requirements and reject those that don't meet your requirements.
11. Evaluate alternatives. - Compare desirable features of the remaining alternatives and give each alternative a comparative rating on each feature.
12. Compare alternatives. - Generate a total score for each remaining alternative and compare. Multiply the rating earned by one alternative for each feature by the weight assigned to that feature in step 8. Like for a rating of 1 to 10, you assign 5 to a feature (like sturdiness, or even supervisory resposibilities) which you might have assigned a weight of 30% (5 x 0.30). Do this for each feature on each alternative. Then compare total scores for each alternative. The highest score becomes a tentative choice.
13. Test the tentative choice for consequences. - What will happen in the short, mid, and long term for this decision?
14. Make the final decision. - If it passes step 13, implement it. If not, proceed to the next highest scoring alternative.
Return to step 1 if you haven't found a suitable choice, begin the whole thing again and make sure you don't miss anything.
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