Posts from — February 2008

Website Project Selection Decision Matrix – Technique

The Project selection decision matrix technique described here is a project management best practice as defined by the project management institute (PMI). Except the PMI would call this a scoring model.

Website Project Selection Decision Matrix - Websites

American Society for Quality
This site has a pretty good description of using a decision matrix but be prepared to wade through some technical terms and general geekery.

Website Project Selection Decision Matrix - Books

Practical Project Initiation - Karl E. Wiegers
This book is among the best I have seen for down to earth practical project management techniques. And the section on project selection is excellent. This book is highly recommended.

Now that we have made our website project selection matrix, here are a couple of tips to rolling out your website project selection decision matrix into your organization a success:

Tailor your impact driver list – The example’s impact driver list isn’t the right impact list for your group, so you will want to tailor it. Some of types of impact drivers you might want to add are: financial performance (Internal rate of return, project payback), technical (complexity, reusability), resources (funding, staff, materials cost), strategic value (project strategic fit, strategic direction fit), risk (business, technical). I’d recommend at least 6 impact drivers but less than 12 with a good balance between technical and business drivers.

Set a minimum impact score – Make a minimum impact score that a project must score above to be implemented. This will weed out the projects that are simply not worth the money to implement and save a lot of needless discussion.

Set up a project selection group – Try to build a group of decision makers, not lackeys, from the business, marketing, and technical groups you do work for. Use this group to help guide the project selection process. I’d recommend meeting with this group at least quarterly.

Work through the decision matrix as a group – Working through the decision matrix as a group will help everyone understand each project’s issues and trade offs, and help draw consensus between the groups where it’s possible. Where consensus is not possible, I recommend that you, as the website honcho, break the tie.

Develop a high-level project roadmap - Project selection using this process is great but when can they generally expect these great projects to be complete? A high-level schedule of upcoming projects, also called a project roadmap, will help everyone understand when the good stuff is scheduled to appear.

It’s pretty easy to see how using a project selection decision matrix can really transform the way your organization thinks about projects. It may be so transformational that you could see the folks sponsoring projects think about the value of a new project before they propose them. Give the decision matrix process a try in your organization and let me know how it goes.

Interested in learning more about a decision matrix?