Document weighting and criteria analysis

Introduction

Organizations must efficiently manage and prioritise their documentation to align with strategic goals and regulatory requirements. This guide provides a solid framework for the weighting and evaluation of business documents. By following a structured process, Organizations can ensure that their most critical documents receive the attention they deserve, supporting informed decision-making and compliance with industry standards.

The following sections outline the criteria for document importance, methods for rating and weighting documents, and steps for calculating and normalising scores. This approach helps Organizations prioritise their documentation efforts, ensuring that resources are allocated effectively to support overall business objectives.

How it works

In simple terms, Document weighting assesses the importance of a document is to an organization. Document criteria analysis assess how good the document it. A great document may be of little importance to an organization but a poor document may still be of vast importance.

Document weighting

This outlines the process for determining the importance of business documents within your Organization. We follow these steps to ensure a structured and comprehensive approach to document prioritisation.

This image is an example of the weightings applied to a document.

Step 1: Establish importance

This is how we establish the importance of a document:

• Alignment with organizational goals: Evaluate how well each document supports the core objectives of the Organization.

• Impact on decision making: Assess the influence of each document on key business decisions.

• Scope of influence: Determine whether the document impacts the entire Organization or specific departments.

• Compliance & regulatory requirements: Identify documents required for legal or regulatory adherence.

• Stakeholder interest: Gauge the importance of documents to key stakeholders, including investors, management, and employees.

Step 2: Rate each document

For automatic weighting, we use a scoring model where each criterion is rated on a predefined scale (e.g., 1-5). For manual validation, you can involve stakeholders in scoring each document against these criteria through surveys or workshops and adjust their weightings.

• Example scale:

  • 1: Very Low

  • 2: Low

  • 3: Medium

  • 4: High

  • 5: Very High

Step 3: Assign Weights to Each Criterion

Not all criteria will hold the same level of importance. Assign weights to each criterion based on its relative importance to the Organization’s strategy. This is done through stakeholder input, strategic alignment workshops, or expert judgment.

• Defined Weights:

• You can update document weighting standards in Settings > Documents

  • Alignment with Organizational Goals: 30%

  • Impact on Decision Making: 25%

  • Scope of Influence: 20%

  • Compliance and Regulatory Requirements: 15%

  • Stakeholder Interest: 10%

• The total score must be 100%

Step 4: Calculate Weighted Scores

We then multiply the scores from Step 2 by the weights assigned in Step 3 for each document. Sum these to get a total weighted score for each document.

• Calculation Example:

  • If a document scores 5 for Alignment, 4 for Impact, 3 for Scope, 2 for Compliance, and 1 for Stakeholder Interest:

    • Weighted Score = (50.30) + (40.25) + (30.20) + (20.15) + (1*0.10)

    • Weighted Score = 1.50 + 1.00 + 0.60 + 0.30 + 0.10 = 3.50

Step 5: Normalise the Scores

To compare the importance across documents, we normalise the scores so that they are relative to each other. This is done by dividing each document’s score by the highest score or by summing all scores and dividing each by the total.

• Normalisation Example:

  • If the highest score is 4.85, then normalised score for a document with a score of 3.50 is:

    • Normalised Score = 3.50 / 4.85 ≈ 0.72

Step 6: Rank the Documents

We then rank the documents based on the normalised scores to determine their relative importance. This ranking can guide how resources, attention, and efforts are allocated among the strategic documents.

Example of a Weighting Table (Hypothetical)