Concordance

Concordance is a decision management solution that helps your project, department, committee or board make higher quality decisions, in less time with greater commitment.

Concordance helps you avoid conflict and misunderstandings while fully documenting the decision-making process and outcomes, helping you use resources more efficiently.

Effective Decision-making

Group decision-making is often risky, hard and expensive. A structured decision-making process can reduce the time and cost required to make decisions.

All of these are negative effects of an unstructured decision-making process:

There are many ways to implement structured decision-making, but all of them have the goal of eliminating these negative effects.

Concordance is a simple solution for structured decision-making, offering the flexibility to support a range of processes and decisions at any level. As your team’s needs grow or as your decision processes evolve, Concordance can grow with you.

Benefits

Concordance helps you get ahead of the decision-making curve. Using Concordance promotes:

Who Can Benefit From Concordance?

Concordance adds value to any group who make work-related decisions regularly. Any meaningful decision can benefit from better prioritization, greater transparency, better organized information, more conclusive resolution and a clearer history of decision-making.

Project teams need to be able to make decisions quickly, with clear, defensible process and reasoning that can be explained to management or governance bodies. Concordance helps rapid decision-making stay focused, organized, well-thought out, and rational.

Departments within an organization typically have a substantial amount of work independent of other departments. Concordance can help a department manager manage decisions relating to all of the projects going on under a larger department goal umbrella, keeping the big picture relevant.

Committees and governance bodies determine activities and outcomes that can affect the entire organization. They must keep a high level of consistency and transparency to answer questions from parties who are affected by their decisions. Concordance brings a new level of trust in the process to these bodies and their constituents by outlining the desired goal of a decision, keeping records of what alternatives were considered, and providing insight into why things were decided in a certain way.

Boards of directors face complex decisions with substantial uncertainly, multiple objectives, and a great deal of scrutiny. Directors also tend to have a broader range of perspectives and experience. Concordance helps unify and focus the board’s decision-making, and provides continuity across infrequent sessions. Concordance may also be used to improve commitment to decisions by offering a new level of transparency to management and other stakeholders, as well as allowing them to give input.

Features

Concordance organizes decision-making using agendas. An agenda is a set of decision items that are grouped by:

In addition to outlining the purpose, creator, person responsible and other information, agendas support threaded discussions about the agenda itself so members can coordinate on the purpose and settings.

Agendas assign a decision-making model – an approach to resolutions. Being explicit about the process that will be used to resolve a decision helps build commitment to the resolution early in the process.

Concordance supports a wide range of decision models.

An agenda may permit or prohibit voting. If voting on decisions is allowed, you can choose to offer voting for any given decision.

Decisions can be ordered by rank within an agenda. Ranking decisions helps your team focus on the most important decisions first. Concordance offers two approaches to ranking.

The decision creator sets a decision’s simple rank according to their own sense of the importance of the issue. Simple ranking is intentionally minimalist and is completely optional.

Concordance also offers Advanced Ranking for prioritization. Agendas can order decisions using a 16 point scale. The decision owner sets the Advanced Ranking value by answering four simple drop-down questions in a form that identify urgency, connectedness and other factors in a way that is easily understood and comparable across decisions.

When you create a decision you are creating a simple but powerful context for information management.

Each decision can have unlimited alternatives, attached documents and discussions, and additional decisions management-specific information.

Concordance decisions can be date-driven, and can be marked with a percent complete. Types of dates available to be set include:

Concordance strongly encourages teams to align decisions with the goals those decisions support. Linking decisions to goals is a best practice that recognizes the fact that decisions are always made in the context of a goal. Groups that use the goal linking feature help eliminate the confusion, distraction and controversy that often slows down decision-making and raises the cost of decisions.

If a decision allows team members to vote on its alternatives, you see the vote grid. The vote grid shows team members’ preferences, the strength of those preferences, and any comments on their votes.

Voting can be configured as a secret ballot. Secret ballots show all members the tally, but no member can see how individuals voted. Alternatively a vote can be fully public.

A decision that allows voting may permit just one vote per person, or it may permit as many votes per-person as there are alternatives. The former is used for all or nothing decisions; the latter is suitable for selecting the best alternatives of a range of possibilities.

Concordance promotes a consistent approach to facts, requirements and resolutions.

Each of these categories of information is separated and structured in dialog threads. Members’ comments can be marked public or private and official or unofficial so that you can better focus discussion and recognize agreement between the members.

Big decisions often have multiple results from the decision-making process, for example, when different departments have their own implementation tasks.

To support these more complex situations Concordance allows multiple resolutions per decision. When all the results of the decision have been recorded the decision owner marks the decision status “Resolved” to freeze the decision for implementation and future reference.

Learn More

It is easy to get started with Concordance. Creating an account and exploring is a straightforward path to confident use.

To speak with one of our experts about the benefits of Concordance and how you can apply structured decision-making please contact us.

For to schedule a demo or for other sales questions please reach out to sales@evisioner.com.