Prioritizing and Aligning Continuous Improvement Projects with Strategies: Q&A

Rod Baxter is principal and co-founder of Value Generation Partners, headquartered in Naples, FL. In his 30-year career, he has led operational excellence and continuous improvement efforts for global Fortune 500 companies.

  Business Intelligence   Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

Rod Baxter joined us for the webinar Prioritizing and Aligning Continuous Improvement Projects with Strategies. He shared some tools and valuable information to help make your job as a project manager a little bit easier. Let’s take a look at some of the questions he didn’t get to answer during the question-and-answer period at the end of the session…

1. What is the relationship of cost and benefit paralysis in the context of this presentation?
If I understand the question correctly, you are asking if this approach costs more than it benefits. I believe this approach has benefits, which far outweigh the costs. It really does not take that much time or effort to conduct the project prioritization or the alignment to the strategies, yet it results in an assurance that your organization is working on projects that will support achievement of the strategic goals.

2. Shouldn't one criteria be how projects impact the longer-term strategy of the company?
Absolutely, you could have criteria for impact to long-term strategy. I believe the category of “impact” in the project prioritization matrix addresses this question. The four impact categories in my example are finance, customer, internal processes and learning and growth. The projects should be evaluated against the four categories, or whatever categories your organization chooses from a …

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