Executive Summary

Decision making and problem solving is an essential leadership skill in current business environment. Generally higher management use their past experience and gut feeling for decision making. However there are available tools and techniques to support the decision markers. This report comprehensive analysis the decision analysis methods such as big data, Delphi methods, open space technologies and decision trees. Further this report has been taken subsidiaries John Keells Holdings (JKH) which is the biggest conglomerate of the Sri Lanka. Secondary data such as journal articles, company publications, and industry related books has been used to conduct this report.

1.0 Harnessing the power group

1.1 Delphi method

Currently, collective decision making method is commonly using in the business world. However there are many issues in unstructured group discussion which lead to biasness of the decision making. In tradition unstructured meeting, powerful and talkative participants can influence more and dominate the meeting. Further engagement of the participants to the meeting could be even depend on seating arrangement of the meeting. Therefore unstructured meetings are not much effective approach to decision making. Delphi method is generally used systematic approach to prevent the above issues of group discussion. In corporate world, Delphi method is used to reach a collective solution for the issue (Hsu, 2007).
“Elephant House” is one of famous brand of John Keells Holdings which come under Ceylon Cold Stores: one of subsidiary of JKH. There are many ice cream and beverages products under brand name of Elephant House. Time to time, JKH launch new products under this brand name. Delphi method is a good technique to predict the future sales level of current and new products. There need to be a facilitator to coordinate the Delphi session (Diasz, 2017). Therefore General Manger of the Ceylon Cold Stores can be selected as a facilitator. Facilitator’s main responsibility is to conduct the Delphi session without any bias and facilitate the responses of panel of experts. Further effectiveness of Delphi method depend on panel of expertise who participate it. Generally there need to be 5 to 20 participants to have an effective Delphi session. If there are more experts in the pool, it helps to make smarter decisions through the process (MacDougall, Ritchie, Yalden, and
Bradley 2016). In JKH, there are 12 to 15 participants in the session including brand managers, marketing managers, sales managers and finance manager. When select the participants for the Delphi session, company need to select different expertise in difference functions.