Ranking and Optimizing Projects, Initiatives and Programs

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

 

Prioritizing your own tasks is easy. You are in charge and no one else has a vote. There are no politics or agendas beyond your own.

Prioritizing cross-functional or enterprise-level initiatives is something else. Typically, it is done by a committee that usually does not share the same criteria for determining what is important and what is not. Politics, turf, conflicting agendas, persuasion skills and personalities all come into play. Unfortunately, those are not the criteria that should be used for determining what is in the best interest of the company. All too often, urgency rules the day.

The Method

In order to resolve the defects inherent in most initiative prioritization efforts, there needs to be a pragmatic set of criteria against which each initiative can be ranked. The following steps can be used to accomplish this objective.

1. Create a list of criteria that can be used in the ranking process.
2. Weight each criteria in terms of how important it is related to the other criteria. The sum of all weights given to criteria must equal 100.
3. Have each person with a vote score each initiative using the criteria established based on a 10-point scale, 10 being most important and 1 being the least.
4. Multiply the criteria's score against its relative weight for each initiative.
5. Collect the rating packages and organize by …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.