Goal Programming Techniques to Support End User Decision Making

End users are frequently challenged with decision making where the goals, objectives, and priorities of management and entire functional areas are in conflict or defy standard quantifiable assessment (i.e., return on investment, payback period, etc.). In addition, objectives, priorities, and resources are constantly changing as corporate politics, staff turnover, or market conditions drive a firm in new directions. End users require, therefore, a straightforward capability of displaying resource or other constraints and the relative priorities of initiatives and projects in such a way that the manager can strive towards several objectives simultaneously. This paper discusses a well-established modeling technique, Goal Programming and shows how this once involved analysis technique has been simplified with the advent of powerful desktop hardware and software. GP models can now be developed on personal computers and used by managers and senior staff to simulate, in a matter of a few minutes, any scenario, which represents the relative priorities of initiatives and projects within defined resource or other constraints. Jeff Butterfield, S. Butterfield, and Joseph Geiger