Your department is hiring a senior manager to direct a group of strong and effective project managers who work on the company’s high-visibility, customer-facing, strategic initiatives.  It’s important to find someone who can quickly ramp their knowledge of your company’s customers, business partners, and product/service offerings. In addition to content expertise, the new hire should be a very strong leader, as he/she will be managing experienced project managers as well as assuming the helm on a couple of the enterprise’s most complex and business-critical initiatives. It is also imperative that this new manager work well across multiple stakeholder functions within the company.  To that end, you’ve assembled a cross-functional panel representing 8 peer departments who have each interviewed the candidates and provided thorough feedback.  Finally, it is worth noting that this is an expensive role, and the candidates vary pretty widely in terms of their current salaries.  If you don’t spend too much on this role, you’ll have just enough slack in your budget to hire a half-time admin, which everyone else in the department really wants you to do – all feel the pain of printing, assembling, and binding proposals when there isn’t someone whose job description encompasses that set of tasks. A summary of the qualifications and background information about 5 candidates is shown in the Table attached (image). Solve this using the table and the “rating-and-weighting” approach (single-attribute value functions, swing weights).

Your department is hiring a senior manager to direct a group of strong and effective project managers who work on the company’s high-visibility, customer-facing, strategic initiatives.  It’s important to find someone who can quickly ramp their knowledge of your company’s customers, business partners, and product/service offerings. In addition to content expertise, the new hire should be a very strong leader, as he/she will be managing experienced project managers as well as assuming the helm on a couple of the enterprise’s most complex and business-critical initiatives. It is also imperative that this new manager work well across multiple stakeholder functions within the company.  To that end, you’ve assembled a cross-functional panel representing 8 peer departments who have each interviewed the candidates and provided thorough feedback.  Finally, it is worth noting that this is an expensive role, and the candidates vary pretty widely in terms of their current salaries.  If you don’t spend too much on this role, you’ll have just enough slack in your budget to hire a half-time admin, which everyone else in the department really wants you to do – all feel the pain of printing, assembling, and binding proposals when there isn’t someone whose job description encompasses that set of tasks.

A summary of the qualifications and background information about 5 candidates is shown in the Table attached (image). Solve this using the table and the “rating-and-weighting” approach (single-attribute value functions, swing weights).