Sure, it will give you some numbers, but those numbers will not be trusted (or even relevant) to your stakeholders. ![]() Without agreement on this, your project prioritization matrix is meaningless. What’s more, if you ask 5 stakeholders what weight to put on the criteria, you’ll probably get 10 answers! Your criteria are not all equally important. Of course, you can own the “process” of selecting criteria - run a brainstorming workshop, for example - but your stakeholders should own the selection of criteria. Those projects exist to support your “customer - stakeholders” and they should be the ones to select the criteria.> The problem is that this team is not the “customer”. Very often, a team that “owns resources” will put together a priority matrix to help figure out what they should tackle first. So let’s look at why the project prioritization matrix fails and what we can do to fix it. That seems like a pretty significant consequence ( view this infographic to see the impact of aligning projects to strategy). Projects are bigger and the consequences of picking the wrong ones can be spectacular.įor example, picking the wrong projects can increase your project failure rates by around 30%. If you’re prioritizing short tasks, things that don’t have much impact over the long term, then this is fine. which is okay if decisions are not very important. The core problem is caused by its main benefits - the prioritization matrix is a tool designed to be quick and easy to use. Problems with Project Prioritization Matrix This example will show you what the maths looks like. Of course, you’ll probably want to do this in a spreadsheet. You have a priority score for your project… and you can move on to do the same calculation for the next project. Keep going until you have added up the weighted scores for all the criteria… and that’s it. (Weight of Criterion 1 x Score of Criterion 1) + (Weight of Criterion 2 x Score of Criterion 2) + (Weight of Criterion 3 x Score of Criterion 3) + …. Now you have your weighted criteria and your scores for each project, you can work out the weighted score for each project by doing a fairly simple calculation: 1-5 scale) for all criteria or doing some maths to convert scores into “normalized scores” - I won’t go into how you do this here, but be aware of this step - many people miss it and it causes problems. This means either using the same scale (e.g. ![]() In decision-science speak, we talk about normalizing scores. You need to score each project against each criterion, but you need to come up with a suitable scale. You should then weight these criteria - usually people will give each one a percentage-based weighting. These criteria should reflect your business goals. Let’s spend a minute looking at how the project prioritization matrix is usually deployed.įirst, you define a set of criteria that you will use to score projects. This is something that everyone can understand and relate to. Your priority matrix also spits out a clean, unambiguous number for “priority”. Once you have your spreadsheet, it’s easy to tweak criteria weights and to see the effect on your ranking immediately. Most business managers can understand the concept of a weighted score in a spreadsheet. In principle, a prioritization matrix is easy to use and to use to make decisions. It’s not the maths that’s difficult (and that’s where most articles on prioritization matrices focus), it’s all the human stuff. It’s pretty simple in concept, but can be really hard to do well. Why? Well, you’re trying to work out which projects are most important so that you can prioritize them. What is Prioritization Matrix?Ī prioritization matrix is a simple tool where you create a set of criteria (which should map to your business goals) and use them to score your projects. In this article I would like to share some ideas on how to use the prioritization matrix to prioritize projects in a way that gives you a chance to succeed. ![]() In this blog I often talk about the project prioritization process and the best method of implementing it.
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