Lynn Bamford’s Job Selection (Using IDS Multicriteria Assessor)

Lynn Bamford is about to graduate from the Department of Information Technology at the University of Technology. For the past few months she has been involved in the job search process. She grew up in Brussels and has many relatives and friends there, so she intends to find a job in a city around Europe. She has excellent curriculum vitae with a high grade point average and a strong record of campus participation in clubs and activities. As a result, she has had a number of good interviews with various companies. She now has job offers from five companies: Systems Developers, Anderssun Consulting, Computing Software Systems (CSS), the South-Tech Company, and Electronic Village.

Systems Developers and Anderssun Consulting are both large international consulting firms with offices in several major cities in Europe. If Lynn accepted the offer of either of these firms, she would primarily work on project teams assigned to develop decision support and information systems for corporate clients around Europe. If she went with Systems Developers, her home base would be in Rome, and if she accepted Anderssun’s offer she would be located in Amsterdam. However, in both cases she would be travelling a great deal and could sometimes be on the road at a client location for as much as six to nine months. CSS is a software and computer systems development company with a campus-like location in Berlin. Although her job with CSS would involve some travelling, it would never be more than several weeks at any one time. South-Tech is a bank holding company that operates eight different banks and its various branches in several counties in Europe. If Lynn accepted South-Tech’s offer, she would be located in London where she would work in its operations system area. She would be involved in developing information and support systems for bank operations and she would have minimal travel. Electronic Village is a chain of discount stores specializing in electronic products such as televisions, stereos, CD players, VCRs, and computers. Her job with Electronic Village would be at its corporate headquarters in Paris, where she would be developing and maintaining computer systems to be used for inventory control at the hundreds of Electronic Village stores across Europe. She would be required to travel very little.

Systems Developers has offered Lynn a starting salary of €30,000 annually, and Anderssun Consulting has offered her €34,000 per year. CSS has offered her an annual salary of €40,000, whereas South-Tech has offered her €45,000 per year, and Electronic Village has offered her a salary of €36,000 per year.

Lynn has a difficult time making her decision. All the companies have excellent reputations, are financially healthy, and have good opportunities for advancement. All are demanding in terms of the workload they require. All five companies have given Lynn only a few weeks to make a decision regarding their offers.

Lynn has decided to use a multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method to help her decide which job offer she should accept. She has developed a list of criteria that are important to her in deciding which job to take, including in no particular order: (1) salary; (2) cost of living in the city where she would be located; (3) amount of travel associated with her job; (4) climate (weather) where she would be located; (5) entertainment and cultural opportunities including sports, theatre, museums, parks, and so on; (6) universities where she can work on an MBA degree part-time and at night; (7) the crime rate in the city where she would live; (8) the nature of the job and what she would be doing; and (9) her proximity to friends and relatives. Lynn realizes that she has very limited information on which to compare the five jobs based on most of these criteria so she knows she needs to go to the library and do some research, especially on the five different job locations.

Put yourself in Lynn’s shoes and use all or some of her criteria and your own preferences and knowledge to help her assess and analyse the jobs using the concepts, theory and methods you have studied in the “Decision Analysis for Business and Management” course.

Notes on writing the project report

You should imagine you are writing a consulting report for the client (Lynn Bamford), not an academic piece for your lecturers. The focus of the main report should be on recommendations, with enough background to give the client an insight into what you’ve done and some confidence in the results. Technical details, detailed calculations etc. should be put in the appendices. 

The main body of the report should be no more than 5 pages long for individual report, including a separate title page with your student ID, and the sections for abstract, contents and references among other sections. There is no page limit on the appendices. Try to avoid using dense paragraphs of text – use bullet points and tables where you can. Your report should be concise and ‘to the point’ and refer to source material where appropriate (see below). You can create appendices to include other materials that cannot be put in the main body of the report.

1 The report should be well structured, with numbered pages and sections, and typically include (although you may have further sections or subsections):

• • Title page
• o Separate page!
• o To, from, date; your student ID
• • Abstract/executive summary (max ½ page text)
• o Include key results
• • Contents 
• o Number sections & pages
• • Introduction (to the report, stating aims, objectives, etc.) 
• • Background (relevant literature in relation to the theory and methods to be employed, etc.)
• o You do not need to give much academic background, briefly describe the key techniques and their assumptions.
• o One or two standard references are sufficient; any more advanced academic material is not required, but if you feel you must include it, confine it to appendices and/or brief footnotes
• • Methodology employed (e.g. methods of data collection and assumptions made)
• o Data found from library, Internet, etc.
• o Highlight main assumptions
• • Results (description including tables, charts, etc. of the results from the analysis of the data). Note that all data, calculations, spreadsheet output, etc. should appear in appendices and not in the main body of the report.
• • Discussion and sensitivity of results (critical discussion of the results including discussion of assumptions, etc.)
• • Conclusions and implications arising from the discussion of your results.
• • Appendices containing printout from spreadsheets or other tools used.
• o Do not print out all large worksheets – print only relevant or example parts
• o Remember to include your spreadsheets in a file; you may zip the file.
• o In the main body, refer to specific numbered sections/pages of your appendices for detail to support points you make or results you give in the main report.

2 Your work should be word processed. Charts, pictures, etc. should be inserted into the document prior to printing. Avoid overly-informal language. The document should not contain typing, numerical, grammatical, format or presentational errors (marks will be deducted for such errors).

The minimum font size allowed is Times Roman 10 and charts should be correctly formatted with appropriate labels, legends, etc.

6 References should be in Harvard style, [e.g. Wilson (2003) suggests that Gantt charts have been in existence for almost a century]. If you quote from a reference the quote should be in quotation marks and the page number should be given, [e.g. “PERT and CPM are basically time-oriented methods” (Taha, 1992, p.450)]

7. Indicative marks breakdown: