Arguments, data, advantages, and disadvantages should support your decision. What's more, if you're thinking about starting a new business, considering positive and negative aspects is fundamental to forecast possible profit and earnings. To clarify positive and negative aspects, you must create a good business strategy to build a pros and cons list. Here you'll learn how to develop and use a Pros and Cons Template.

A healthy–done pros and cons list consists of all the factors you should consider to make the best decision regarding any project or situation on the same page. An informed decision is key to success in any personal or group project you have. 

Besides, objective decision-making is more easily achievable due to the simplicity of a cons list template. Furthermore, a list of this nature is highly suitable and can give you a new perspective on an objective decision you must make, which will reduce redundancy. 

You and your team should understand how decisions can affect the development of a particular project. Even better if you organize an environment where participants can discuss and express themselves about what biases are present and leave comments. This way, you can decide what is best for your purposes and decrease the risk.

Generally, a pros and cons template is a two-column list, one for pros or advantages and the other for cons or disadvantages. In both columns, you must insert all the crucial factors determining if your project has a high probability of success.

In the first column, you must insert all the pros you found during the research stage. Pros should incorporate the direct benefits you or your company can get in the medium or long term and all the positive implications. 

Consider all stakeholders' opinions, professional or not, before making any critical decision. These participants can provide a pro or benefit you've missed. Still, a solid argument must accompany any pro.

Regarding the cons column, this should consider the aspects that play to the detriment of the success. In other words, you need to include all the adverse effects of an action on your goals. Of course, this list should be built according to a rating scale, i.e., from strongest to weakest impact.

Some cons you should consider are the price of a task or project, all the weaknesses of a specific activity, the number of specialists, an expensive budget, etcetera.      

The idea is to brainstorm the general consequences of all interest categories and recognize and analyze positive and negative implications for better decisions.

Now, we're giving you a series of examples of a pros and cons list for informed decisions. Each argument and item provides further evidence to support any choice.

Suppose your organization is thinking about buying a new machine for a specific task. Some examples of pros would be the following:

• The machine will accelerate the particular job.
• The machine will reduce the costs of operations.
• The machine is small, so it takes up less space than other machines.
• As the machine is a new acquisition, it won’t need spare parts or repairs in the short term,

Now, we’re giving you some examples of cons to making a final decision about buying or not the machine. 

• The machine is expensive. 
• It will be a bit difficult to leverage the investment.
• You will need to hire a specialist to use the machine.
• If the machine breaks down, finding spare parts can be difficult.

Now, let’s see another example. Let’s guess you’re planning a personal trip to Europe or a different part of the world. Let’s check the benefits of this challenge:

• You can meet new and exciting people.
• You can build interesting relationships that can be beneficial for your work.
• You can have new experiences that help you to grow as a person.
• You can be aware of personal emotions that you commonly do not check.

Next, let’s see some risks related to this project:

• You probably will spend a lot of money and time on this project.
• Some places represent a terrible scenario or are too dangerous to be alone.
• The effort to travel alone to different countries could be too much.

This template integrates two columns that indicate the value of any item on the list in addition to the pros and cons. The value scale is from 0 to 10, and the final value is mandatory for evaluating professional or personal decisions. Since it is an Excel template, you can insert other columns that are relevant for deciding whether you continue or not with the project. 

This template is available on Vertex42.

This advanced template brings more information than the previous template. As you can see in the image above, you can insert a picture of any item or a pros and cons chart. This way, you can verify if the cons outweigh the pros or vice versa. 

Cons charts will help you check if adverse effects are more robust than positive ones. Besides, it integrates a description column to reduce uncertainty where you can describe any relevant aspect. In a few words, this template is a powerful tool to explain all the facts and evaluate them.     

You can download this pros and cons list template for Microsoft Word from Templatelab.

This pros and cons template is perfect for personal decision-making, making resolutions less subjective or influenced by personal biases. As you can notice, it's effortless, so you can note your ideas and compare them easily. Of course, the pro-con analysis you can develop with this template is more straightforward than the ones you can perform with more advanced templates, but still, this file is suitable to clarify thoughts.

You can download this Microsoft Word basic template from printabletodolist.

A basic T chart template is ideal for starting from scratch and avoiding mistakes like cognitive biases. As shown in the image above, this template is only configured on two opposing sides. 

This template is excellent for direct comparisons. Brainstorm and write all the points you believe are worth considering, either the positives or negatives of any item or situation. 

Besides, this template applies to all topics. It has a certain number of rows, but if you need more pros and cons, you can add them without a problem. This file lets you efficiently do your job!

This template is for Microsoft Word,.

You can download this T chart for pros and cons analysis from 101Planners.

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