The Wrong Way to Determine Priorities

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Portfolio Management  

Portfolios are created for many reasons, including consolidating resources, client needs or perhaps for economies of scale. Whatever the reason, it is often up to the portfolio manager to determine what projects have priorities over other projects. There are often limited amounts of resources to dedicate to the different projects, and managing the portfolio is often about making decisions about how, when and if to execute the projects.

The role of portfolio manager includes making hard decisions about which projects have which priorities, and sometimes determining if a project even needs to be done at all. In addition, the portfolio manager will need to defend those decisions against zealous stakeholders and inform project teams about the decisions, learning the hard way that you cannot please everyone all the time--and sometimes you cannot please anyone any time. Unfortunately, there are many wrong ways of choosing priorities; and while no responsible portfolio manager would use one of these methods, there are lessons to be learned in examining the wrong ways of determining a project’s priority.

The Stairs
There was a myth that floated around school when I was in college. It concerned a professor who liked to grade things on a curve, but instead of basing the curve on the graded papers he would take all of the papers to a staircase and toss all of them up …

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