prioritization of projects

Julie,
You can have a short-sighted approach or think more in-terms of a model that will learn an grow as your move through your process improvement program …..  your idea of a proritization matrix is on the right lines …. there are a number papers published on use of proritization matrix approach …. i can forward you one if you would like me to …. key is to have a rating system with multiple factors critical to your business … eg.  VOC, VOB (For some people this is Voice of the Boss), Savings, Cost, Resources, etc. include the most critical and give each a weight according to your business needs … make sure to share it with all decision makers …. plug and play using some old projects you have completed …. you will get a very good sense of what it is about ….. and keep reviewing as you go through your projects and improve on your model ….. I personally found it to be a very useful tool when you have a pipeline full of projects and need to proritize and assign resources ….. gradually you can build on the rating to include decisions such as: which resources to be used, project timeline, etc…..

Project Prioritization should be done in alignment with your organization’s Strategic Plan.  That is, the first prioritization factor should ask whether or not this project will contribute to the goal of the organization.  From there, you should establish Effort and Impact factors, dealing with the resources required to actually doing the project as a ratio to the benefits (economic, customer satisfaction, safety, etc.)  those which show the most significant impact should be highest priority.
Note that this “project pipeline” should be a living document, with new opportunities being assessed and fed into the pipeline, displacing, sometimes, previous opportunities because of strategic, or other advantage.  It is best to to this at an organizational level, which can put local opportunities on the back-burner or elevate them to a higher priority.  Be aware that local opportunites, on the global level, may contribute to the suboptimization of the overall system if they are not considered in light of the overall goals of the system.

Neil,
I sure would like to take a look at the “Charter (in MS Excel)” if you would be so kind. Please send me your email address and I will do likewise.
Thanks,
Sue

Julie,
There’s an excellent article in the Sept issues of Quality Progress magazine describing how to use the voice of the market to identify value performance gaps and to use those to set project priorities.  Can’t remember the name of the article, but the author was Reidenbach.  There’s another article by the same author in the July issue (same magazine) describing how to prioritize projects based on alignment with the organization’s strategy.  I have some prioritization templates based on those articles if you’re interested.
Reg

We use a Cause and Effect Matrix to prioritize as well as manage project hoppers. Use the “Output” columns to list the criteria that you think valid in judging a project’s value. Use the “Input” columns to list all of the projects. Ask leadership and MBB’s to score each project to the output criteria and then sort. Rationalize the sorted list of projects and charter.
The criteria listed in earlier responses are good.Strategy, Customer Value, Business Financial Impact and Probability of Success are our major categories that we may define further in the output columns.

Could you send me your charter as well.  I like your logic flow and think it would be helpful in my operation.
 
Marylou

Hi Niel, can you please send me the MS Excel template to raghusuratkal at yahoo dot com…thanks…