Paramount Decisions is a decisions making platform that helps organization make collaborative, sound and transparent decisions. Decision-making is a major function of every organization. Everyday businesses, non-profits, and governments make decisions that have major economic, social, and environmental implications. These decisions include multiple stakeholders with complex and competing trade-offs. Often times an unsound decision-making method (or no formal method) is used which can affect the quality of the decision and result in unintended consequences.
Paramount Decisions is built using the current state-of-the art knowledge in decision-making which has been tested through peer-reviewed scientific research conducted at UC Berkeley. Our solution guides you and your collaborators along the decision-making process in several easy-to-follow steps, and allows organizations to develop sound decisions, to document their decisions and enable transparency in the decision-making process. By using Paramount Decisions, organizations can have a structured approach to making and communicating complex decisions with multiple stakeholders.
Businesses, governmental organizations, and nonprofit organizations make hundreds of decisions everyday. In practice, the decision-making process is often ad hoc with many organizations reporting that they do not use a decision-making method or are using unsound decision-making methods. As a result, the decision-making process is not traceable and the reason and motivation behind decisions are not documented. More often than not, decisions are based on politics rather than data.
Paramount Decisions provide a systematic way of making decisions, which is transparent and traceable. Our solution facilitates the collaboration needed when making decisions. This improves collaboration and reduces the time wasted in unnecessary meetings. Additionally, Paramount Decisions reduce the need for re-work and last minute changes in organizational decisions, thus avoiding waste of time and resources. Finally, the transparent and documented decision-making process provided by Paramount Decisions will allow organizations to learn from previous decisions and to better communicate with internal and external stakeholders.
Essentially any organizations, projects or individuals that needs to make transparent and collaborative decisions on a daily basis can benefit from our solution. This includes governments, large corporations (fortune 500 companies), and nonprofits. Our initial product is focused on companies that need to make numerous decisions with a lot of risk/money on stake such as the construction, oil and gas, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industry.
Most decision-making software in the market are based on decision-making methods such as Weighting Rating and Calculating (WRC) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Paramount Decisions is based on a well tested and academic proven group decision-making method known as Choosing By Advantages (CBA). In CBA, decisions are made based on the advantages between the alternatives. Unlike WRC and AHP, which weight factors and attributes, CBA only considers the advantages of the alternatives. Recent research has shown that any decision-making method, which weigh factors or attributes, can be biased and unsound. Additionally, WRC and AHP can miss the context of the decisions resulting in bad decisions. For more on this topic, visit our Blog or Training Section.
Paramount Decisions allows people to make better decisions, communicate the rationale of their decisions with stakeholders, and collaborate with others in the decision-making process. Unlike other solutions, we provide a subscription-based solution based on the number of users, instead of fixed and high license fee. This allows organizations, large and small, to use our product. By having a solution available on the web, tablet, and mobile devices; users can collaborate and make decisions everywhere and on any device.
We are aware that many people currently apply the CBA decision-making method with pen and paper or with Excel. Both of these mediums do not support collaboration with large groups of stakeholders. Furthermore, the information of decisions are often not shared with others. Based on our research, CBA require some level of training and applying it on paper or excel often results in many errors.
Paramount Decisions make applying CBA, an otherwise complex decisions with multiple stakeholders and conflicting objectives, easy in 8 simple steps. You can collaborate in real-time with your colleagues, generate report, and present your decision in an full report or A3 format. Paramount Decisions allow you also to assign tasks, follow decision status, and create decision templates to reuse in future decisions.
Some advance feature of Paramount Decisions will include: analytic to track your decision-making process and knowledge management system to learn from your previous decisions. As an online tool, our platform allow organizations to reference previous decisions so that they learn from projects in different geographical regions. For example, a project manager in California might want see how a similar project in Florida made a particular decision. Currently this learning and cross-organizational transfer of knowledge is not possible without our software as this type of information is often not documented. In the 21st century, companies are recognizing that they live in a knowledge economy and one way to gain a competitive advantage is improve their decision-making and corporate knowledge management. Visit our Overview page for full overview of all features.
We are flattered you asked! Paramount Decisions was co-founded by 3 Civil Engineers from UC Berkeley: Nawras, Paz and Doanh, while Omar joined the team after few months. Nawras (CEO) has numerous accolade in entrepreneurship and construction technology and is recognized as an innovator in the construction technology. Doanh (CTO) has won many prestigious research awards and is an expert in software engineering having started programming at the age of 15. Dr. Paz Arroyo (Advisor) earned her PhD at UC Berkeley while raising twins. She is currently an assistant professor at the Catholic University in Chile and an editor in several prestigious academic journals. Omar (VP of Engineering) has worked at some of the most prestigious companies in Silicon Valley including: Intel, IBM, Palantir technologies, and Facebook.
All 4 of us have worked and conducted research in the AEC industry and so we are well aware of the problems on large-scale and complex projects where hundreds of decisions need to be made every week. We believe that a sound decision-making process can have a tremendous amount of impact for governments, businesses, and nonprofits. Learn more about us here.
Paramount Decision's Support team is here to help.