VISA - Groupware
The VISA GroupWare extension facilitates group decision making via a local area network. Most of the practical use of VISA is about groups coming to a decision by reaching a consensus. What the GroupWare Extension specifically does is let people at different work stations enter their own subjective weights and scores for options and criteria, while maintaining a degree of confidentiality about their own views.
Then, each individual can compare their own views with the pattern for scores / weights of the full group. (By "pattern of" we do not mean an "average". Instead we let you actually review all the scores/ weights for everyone in special new displays. This is because its really important to be able to see when an "average" is made up of many disparate views - or when there is a clear consensus. The "average" view is also available as an option).
The Process
This is a brief guide to the process of reaching a decision using the VISA GroupWare technology. We are talking here about the process issues. These do not include how you use the software - that is covered in the main VISA user guide and in the section (later) on VISA GroupWare displays.
For the purposes of this discuss we will assume there is a "Master" or "Facilitator" person involved in helping a group reach a decision. Usually it is best if they are not, themselves, an interesting party.
The first part of the process should take part away from the computers. Establishing the issues that affect the decision is, in our experience, best done by some type of brain storming method. For example ask everyone involved in the decision to write on Post-it note sheets criteria that they think (individually) are to be considered. Each person should stick these onto a wall, along with the other post-its being added by other people.
The facilitator (or the individual people) can move the post-its around into groups if they appear to be related to each other. After 15 minutes or so you will have a rich set of criteria, formed into groups. Use a short group discussion to distill these into a unified set of criteria (there is no need to exclude any that individual people think are not worthwhile but you should try to consolidate criteria that have different names but are essentially getting at the same issue).
Use a similar process to elicit a set of "Alternatives" - Actually, in practice, you can do this at the same time as eliciting the criteria because people often find it difficult to think about one of these without the other.
Now build a VISA hierarchy of the criteria and enter the options by using the Master VISA GroupWare computer (See Technical Issues Section). Also enter the Alternatives.
Save this model to the VISA GroupWare Shared Directory.
Each user can now open this model. They should then immediately save this model to their own hard disks. If they do not do this they might accidentally save their own scores and weights to the master computer. This would reduce confidentiality.
Each user can now enter scores and weights in the usual way.
It is normally best if users concentrate on their own scores / weights initially rather than trying to observe what other users are doing by using the GroupWare windows. However the Master or Facilitator can use these screens to see how users are progressing and get some feel when to move the discussion on.
User are generally quite silent during this period. (Unless there is more than one person working at each computer - this is sometimes worth doing where there are sub-groups of stockholders in a decision).
Once most of the users are reaching a stage where most of their scores and weights have been entered the facilitator can use the GroupWare displays to decide what issues are worth discussing first.
If using a large screen PC projector you can do this with everyone in a group - but it is often better to make a few suggestions about what display to look at first on the individual screens - then let the participants start the discussion themselves.
For example:
This screen shows the three uses are close to agreement on the weight for "Access" and ""Disruption", but they do not agree on the importance of "Safety" and "Enjoyment". You might start the discussion by asking participants to look at this display and discuss why someone might regard safety as less important - someone might reveal it is them and start to explain the rationale behind this.
Before long there will be a well structured discussion in process - with people revising their views themselves, interactively, as they feel it is appropriate.
The Displays
Access the VISA GroupWare displays via the criteria dialog box:
Click the Group Views button then select:
The display you require. Each display is available at each level except that base criteria do not have "Weights for sub-criteria".
All the displays have the same style, replacing the traditional VISA bars with dots. Each dot represents the views of one of the users.
The display above shows that all users have given zero score to the alternative "Status Quo" on criteria "Safety" and "Capacity". One user has also scored it zero on "Feasibility", whereas all the users have scored it fairly highly on "Flexibility".
You can distinguish between users by selecting the menu items under SETTINGS / SHOW USER COLORS.
You can add an "Average Dot" to each display by selecting SETTINGS / SHOW AVERAGE:
Contact Us
The VISA GroupWare Pack costs $2995 for that you get six standard VISA licenses that can be used as single user VISA systems when they are not being used for GroupWare sessions (including six standard VISA manuals). You get a instruction manual for the VISA GroupWare extension and all the software to run the GroupWare system on the client and facilitator PCs as well as configuration software for managing the VISA users.
To obtain further information or to purchase VISA Groupware please telephone us on 1-800-547-6024 (US) or +44 870 850 8886 (Europe) or email info@SIMUL8.com. Alternatively you may wish to contact Dr Valerie Belton of Management Science, University of Strathclyde, the designer of VISA. Val can be contacted via email at: val.belton@strath.ac.uk Dr Belton also has an excellent book available on Multi Criteria Decision Analysis.