Decision making in business and management

In general, business and management systems should be set up to allow decision making at the lowest possible level.
Several decision making models or practices for business include:
1. SWOT Analysis - Evaluation by the decision making individual or organization of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats with respect to desired end state or objective.
2. Analytic Hierarchy Process - procedure for multi-level goal hierarchy
3. Buyer decision processes - transaction before, during, and after a purchase
4. Complex systems - common behavioural and structural features that can be modeled
5. Corporate finance:
• The investment decision
• The financing decision
• The dividend decision
• working capital management decisions
6. Cost-benefit analysis - process of weighing the total expected costs vs. the total expected benefits
7. Control-Ethics, a decision making framework that balances the tensions of accountability and 'best' outcome.
8. Decision trees
• Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)
• critical path analysis
• critical chain analysis
9. Force field analysis - analyzing forces that either drive or hinder movement toward a goal
10. Grid Analysis - analysis done by comparing the weighted averages of ranked criteria to options. A way of comparing both objective and subjective data.
11. Hope and fear (or colloquially greed and fear) as emotions that motivate business and financial players, and often bear a higher weight that the rational analysis of fundamentals, as discovered by neuroeconomics research
12. Linear programming - optimization problems in which the objective function and the constraints are all linear
13. Min-max criterion
14. Model (economics)- theoretical construct of economic processes of variables and their relationships
15. Monte Carlo method - class of computational algorithms for simulating systems
16. Morphological analysis - all possible solutions to a multi-dimensional problem complex
17. optimization
• constrained optimization
18. Paired Comparison Analysis - paired choice analysis
19. Pareto Analysis - selection of a limited of number of tasks that produce significant overall effect
20. Robust decision - making the best possible choice when information is incomplete, uncertain, evolving and inconsistent
21. Satisficing - In decision-making, satisficing explains the tendency to select the first option that meets a given need or select the option that seems to address most needs rather than the “optimal” solution.
22. Scenario analysis - process of analyzing possible future events
23. Six Thinking Hats - symbolic process for parallel thinking
24. Strategic planning process - applying the objectives, SWOTs, strategies, programs process
25. Trend following and other imitations of what other business deciders do, or of the current fashions among consultants.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_making