Are there tools and best practices to effectively conduct a series of project portfolio prioritization ranking exercises with your IT Department for the upcoming year roadmap?
As the IT PM for the IT Department I am task with devising the best tool(s) and best practice on how to conduct a series of project porfolio priortization ranking collaborations with the department. My criteria: Business expectation Project Complexity Resource Utilization User Experience Risk to the company for either do or not doing...etc.
I thought to use Trello board as a collaboration tool but not sure. I am just trying to get best practices from those of you whom have successfully done so. Saving Changes...
Anthony, I'm in the middle of a portfolio prioritization exercise myself. The 2 most fundamental variables are effort required (how much am I spending for this?), and anticipated Return on Investment (how much am I getting back?).
Adding in "intangibles" or hard to measure variables like "User Experience" requires some creativity. You can define scoring criteria in many categories, but it is hard to combine. In one of my jobs, we had to try and balance product weight vs. "Wow Factor". Not very clean mathematically.
You can assemble your projects and multi-vote..."Who all thinks Project C is more important than Product D?" You can try and come up with some weighting system for variables, which I generally find turns into a numerical soup that nobody really trusts.
The other way to combine criteria like yours is fuzzy logic. That amounts to answering some survey questions like: If User Experience is good, Complexity is low and Business Expectation is high then Output score = Very Good. That creates fuzzy sets which you can compare against the individual projects and you can actually rank things. It's as complicated as Facebook surveys about: Answer these 6 questions and find out what cartoon character you are.
The end result will always be subjective, but if you want to rank projects, then you still need an objective way to combine the subjectivity into a single objective score.
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1 reply by Anthony Gall, PMP, CSM, CCMP, ITIL
Oct 31, 2019 8:04 AM
Anthony Gall, PMP, CSM, CCMP, ITIL
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Thanks Keith
Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Dear Anthony
Interesting question for reflection
Thanks for sharing
The most important thing, in my opinion, is to create a set of criteria that will allow you to prioritize.
The most important is undoubtedly the strategic alignment
Remember that a scoring model is just an aid to help the decision making by an aligned governance committee. If you are lacking the latter, the former won't help.
In terms of calibrating, I'd suggest taking a set of well understood projects and putting them through the scoring model, then look at the relative ranking and have the decision making folks decide if they want to tweak the weights to get the rankings they'd expect for these projects.
Anthony, I'm in the middle of a portfolio prioritization exercise myself. The 2 most fundamental variables are effort required (how much am I spending for this?), and anticipated Return on Investment (how much am I getting back?).
Adding in "intangibles" or hard to measure variables like "User Experience" requires some creativity. You can define scoring criteria in many categories, but it is hard to combine. In one of my jobs, we had to try and balance product weight vs. "Wow Factor". Not very clean mathematically.
You can assemble your projects and multi-vote..."Who all thinks Project C is more important than Product D?" You can try and come up with some weighting system for variables, which I generally find turns into a numerical soup that nobody really trusts.
The other way to combine criteria like yours is fuzzy logic. That amounts to answering some survey questions like: If User Experience is good, Complexity is low and Business Expectation is high then Output score = Very Good. That creates fuzzy sets which you can compare against the individual projects and you can actually rank things. It's as complicated as Facebook surveys about: Answer these 6 questions and find out what cartoon character you are.
The end result will always be subjective, but if you want to rank projects, then you still need an objective way to combine the subjectivity into a single objective score.
Remember that a scoring model is just an aid to help the decision making by an aligned governance committee. If you are lacking the latter, the former won't help.
In terms of calibrating, I'd suggest taking a set of well understood projects and putting them through the scoring model, then look at the relative ranking and have the decision making folks decide if they want to tweak the weights to get the rankings they'd expect for these projects.
Kiron
Thanks Kiron Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
I am in charge of this type of things. I can write a lot but just to put a reference to related documentation take into account this. all related to work with initiatites that some of them could be or not could be projects is on charge of business analyst or a new role that has been created in the last years called BRM. So, you can go for business analysis documentation inside the PMI or you can go for BRM related documentation at https://brm.institute/the-role-of-the-busi...nship-manager/. I was in charge to create the process you are searching for in several companies including my actual work place. Is a matter of strategy. I meant there is not a receipt somebody can offer you. The pipeline of initiatives can be splitted between growth, sustain and mandatory which will determine the risk to take and the resources to assign. With that on hand, in accordance to strategy, prioritization method (with prioritization criterias) can be created. Saving Changes...
