Risk Tree

A decision tree can clarify, as can no other analytical tool, the choices, risks, objectives, monetary gains and information needs involved in an investment problem

The only decision tree app on the AppStore which is designed specifically for business management.

Ever had to make a critical business decision based on a hunch or feeling about its success or failure? For complex investment decisions, a different representation of the information pertinent to the problem—the decision tree—is useful to show the routes by which the various possible outcomes are achieved.

This approach is succinctly detailed in a Harvard Business Review article which can be found here: hbr.org/1964/07/decision-trees-for-decision-making

You will develop a series of questions - "are we confident of the issues?"; "do we have the resources and skills?" - and arrive at a series of decisions - "hire outside experts to help"; "proceed with in-house development"; "explore possible bid partners". Each question has a 'yes' or 'no' answer together with an associated probability and each decision has possible rewards and/or costs associated with it. A detailed bid/no-bid example tree is included in the app which can be used as the basis for your own tree or simply to understand how the process works.

The decision tree created is then analysed and a set of expected outcomes are presented together with their probabilities of occurring. This quantifies and solidifies management's feeling about the endeavour and helps to understand the routes to success more clearly. In addition to the translation of management's experience and intuition into hard numbers, the value of this process lies in its ability to clarify thoughts and provide a disciplined and rigorous framework for assessing a given endeavour. The flexibility also allows any probability to be updated when new information comes in with the impact on the expected outcome being instantly available.

The app allows you to save a file to your device, your local work network or a cloud storage service that you are subscribed to. Saving to your work network obviously offers increased security over purely cloud-based storage. Once saved you can then share this file with colleagues - the more expert inputs the better. No need to be at your desk - just pick up and play on your iPhone or iPad.

I will continue working on enhancements, additions and any bug fixes which you will receive through the usual AppStore update procedure. Please please please contact me through the Support URL page with any suggestions, bugs or criticisms.