Rationalize Your Project Selection Process

Bursting into my office a co-worker started ranting, “This is completely [expletive deleted] irrational. Why, the [expletive deleted], are we redesigning the press release section, again, when we could make a ton of money making user access to the support site require a maintenance contract?”

I agreed. It was completely irrational. Why would we do a low impact project now and defer the high impact project until later? Wasn’t that completely backwards?

And this was part of a larger problem. Our project to-do list was filled with every project that anyone ever dreamed up. And it seemed like all the pet projects from the politically powerful were at the top of the list and the high impact project languished, undone at the bottom.

Even though we had gotten good at executing projects, our ability to select the right projects to execute sucked.

What we needed was a rational project selection process.

We needed a process that would rate the impact of each project so we could objectively compare them. We needed a process that would separate the high impact projects we should fast track for implementation from the lower impact projects we should defer. A process that would reject the very low value projects before they got on the project list. And this process should objective reducing the chance of folks talking low impact, pet projects on to the list as well.

Yeah, that’s it. Good-bye politics. Hello rational decision.

So if this situation sounds at all familiar, you are wondering, “what’s the fix? I have this problem too”. We implemented a decision matrix process. And after some work implementing in our organization, it actually worked. Rationality broke out all over our project selection process. It was great.

A decision matrix works by turning the total benefit of a project into a numeric score. But instead of launching into bunch of techno-babble describing how it works, it’s going to be easier to understand if we just walk through an example.