Document weighting

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.

Open

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

Purpose of Normalisation

• Standardises Scores: Converts raw document scores to a common scale, allowing for meaningful comparisons.

• Ensures Fair Comparisons: Eliminates distortions caused by variations in document characteristics.

• Enhances Consistency: Aligns document evaluations with the structured model used in Document Criteria Analysis.

Normalisation Methodology

The normalisation method used follows the Min-Max normalisation formula:

Where:

• is the raw score for a document.

• and are the minimum and maximum scores across all documents.

• is the normalised score between 0 and 1.

Alternatively, Z-score normalisation is used when document scores have varying distributions:

Where:

• is the mean score of the dataset.

• is the standard deviation.

• This method produces values with a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1, making them more useful for identifying outliers.

Integration with Document Weighting

• The normalised scores are used in final Document Weighting calculations to ensure a balanced evaluation.

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)

This normalisation ensures that document scores reflect their relative importance while remaining fair across different types of documents.

Conclusion

Document Weighting provides a structured and unbiased evaluation framework. This ensures that document assessments support strategic decision-making while maintaining consistency across evaluations.