Multi and Weighted Voting
This quality improvement tool should be read in conjunction with:
Multi Voting
Multi voting is a consensus method for prioritising the issues identified by the project team. The team leader goes through the sticky notes and removes any absolute double-ups (things that mean exactly the same). The idea of this stage of the process is to reduce the number of sticky notes by half. For example, if there are 40 sticky notes after the doubles have been taken out, the aim is to end up with 20 sticky notes.
Each team member gets 20 votes each, and each person must allocate one vote per sticky note (vote on high priority issues). At the end of this round, remove any sticky notes which didn't receive any votes (do not throw these away as you will need to go through them to ensure you are not discarding something important).
Weighted Voting
Remove sticky notes which only received one vote, then two votes and maybe even three votes until you have reduced the number of the remaining sticky notes by 50 per cent. By this time, if you started with 40 sticky notes then it was reduced to 20, each project team member would receive 10 votes each.
In this stage, team members with 10 votes can put all their 10 votes on one sticky note, if they wish, indicating that they think this sticky note most contributes to the problem, or they can spread their 10 votes out across multiple sticky notes.
Figure 1: Multi & Weighted Voting on sticky notes
To learn more about Brainstorming, Affinity Diagrams and Multi Voting, please refer to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement website. You may need to take a moment and register with the IHI for more in-depth information.
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