Management of New Project Ideas and Estimation

Submission of new project ideas must be through a standardized format, where the person must describe:

a) What business objective the project will benefit. Therefore everyone in the managerial level in the organization must have an updated corporate statement about business objectives to compare against.
b) What resources (internal / external, human / equipment / locations / monetary) will be required
c) Project phases, with main milestones where progress will be checked and the idea will be validated
d) Who are the end users of this project or who will be affected by the end result? How are you planning to measure before/after impact?
e) If there is a portfolio decision matrix, the project could be classfied into several dimensions whose values could then be weighed according to importance.
* short term - mid term - long term
* inexpensive - moderate cost - expensive
* cultural fit - some cultural change - high cultural change
* low risk - moderate risk - high risk
* low ROI - standard ROI - high ROI
* low success probability - average success rate - high success probability
etc.

E.g. do you choose a high risk, high ROI project, or a low risk, low ROI project? Do you choose a project with high cultural fit but low ROI or a project with high chances of confrontation in the company, but high ROI?

These factors need to be discussed, then they must be explained to the managers so they are forced to think into this categories to help top management compare apples to apples.