Discussion Boards and a Reflection Discussion

Module 4: Develop Recommendations

Your third paper will be your recommendations to mitigate or eliminate the issue, challenge, or problem. Before you can implement change, you must determine possible solutions.

There are many different ways to determine solutions. Brainstorming requires identifying any number of solutions prior to evaluating each one. While evaluating solutions, make sure you recognize what could go wrong and what the barriers are for each solution. You don’t want to get to the implement and evaluate stage and find that there is a huge downside to the solution. You also need to consider fiscal, political, and personnel limitations, as well as time constraints. If you have a problem that requires immediate attention, you don’t want a solution that is involved and time-consuming. Remember, the risk vs. benefit conundrum is part of every decision-making process as well as the cost-benefit of the solutions.

This link will give you some examples of how to determine possible solutions. There are other links in your readings to assist with this stage.

The next steps are developing recommendations and evaluating recommendations before final selection. Finally, you need to be able to prioritize your selections. To determine the right alternative, it is important to be able to measure the selections against criteria. “The key decision criteria are those things that are important to the organization making the decision, and they will be used to evaluate the suitability of each alternative recommended.” These criteria should be brief, measurable, and be related to your problem statement and alternatives (Erskine et al., 1997, Key decision criteria).

Recognize that recommendations may have implications on other areas. Systems theory or systems thinking is the study of often complex relationships with changes and their environment. Analyzing a problem from a systems theory approach can facilitate “big picture” thinking and the interrelationships between multiple factors. Systems theory analysis can also be used to determine why changes may not be having the anticipated impact.

Make sure your recommendations don’t violate any ethical, legal, or financial regulations. A decision is not created in a vacuum. Your Public Safety Legal Issues and Public Policy course alerted you to legal and public policy issues, whereas the Public Safety Administration Ethics course gave you an in-depth look at ethics. Remember these courses while you work toward your final recommendation for your identified issue or problem.