There are three dimensions to project success — doing the right projects, doing them right and delivering the right value! Understanding Project Prioritisation” focuses on ensuring you’re “doing the right projects”

If you select the wrong projects up front, then however well you implement them you’ll be missing value. Project prioritisation is a critical business management process that is rarely done well.
Projects are bullied through, supported by spurious business cases, evaluated purely in cost/risk terms or justified as ‘mandatory’ either due to external requirements or ‘to achieve plan’. When an effective prioritisation process was applied to a set of eight previously approved projects, seven were found to fail the more rigorous scrutiny. One was irrelevant, one was not addressing the problem, one was already off-the-rails, one was probably costing four times what was required and one was delivering a solution for a non-existent strategy. And so on. Yet each of these project proposals had gone through a four-stage evaluation process that proved, as is common, to be ineffective.

A recent Cranfield University research study found that over 50% of firms were dissatisfied with their project prioritisation process. So this is a common problem.

Project prioritisation is not for the faint-hearted.

Prioritisation is only for those who genuinely want to get a return on their funds and other resources invested. And, it is not difficult; it just requires the pre-requisite value-focused processes to be in place.

“Understanding Project Prioritisation” explains the seven dimensions to an effective prioritisation process. Most organizations usually only use two or three — hence their problems with inappropriate projects that fail on one dimension or another. Once in place, project prioritisation makes decision making easy. The relative attributes and value of each project proposal are made clear; it is easy to compare them on an objective basis and, importantly, to assess if you can actually deliver them — a dimension too often ignored or assumed.

In one organization, this process was used to cull 128 concurrent projects into the top 12 that could be successfully completed. This potentially explosive process was achieved with the full support of the executive team (even when they had lost their ‘pet’ projects as they understood the same rules applied to all).

Who should read

This Guide is designed for use by:

1. Project Investment Committees (PICs) — to learn the nature and components of prioritisation
2. PMOs — who normally support PICs through coordinating project proposals for evaluation and manage the planned and consequent project portfolio
3. Boards and Executives — who need to be able to assess their current prioritisation process against that required for value delivery management
4. Project practitioners, Project Sponsors and their Steering Committees — who all need to understand how their projects are going to be prioritised
5. Auditors — who need to understand the process, its components and how it should work in order to audit the existing processes effectively
6. Vendors and Consultants — who want to propose projects to organizations, to understand how they will be prioritised.

Contents

1. The need for prioritisation
2. The Financial dimension
3. The Risk dimension
4. The Strategic Contribution dimension
5. The Accountability dimension
6. The Capability dimension
7. The Capacity dimension
8. The Business-value dimension
9. The prioritisation proces

Bonus

Condemned to Completion
How and why projects that are obviously failing are continued to completion; and how a value delivery management approach can help overcome the current constraints to cancelling projects that will not deliver value.

Selecting Projects
A article written by Jed Simms on the issues surrounding project selection using a property selection analogy to show how the prioritisation process works