Every company has a strategy, however it remains a dream until it is put to execution. The strategy to execution is an interesting road with multiple stakeholders, ideas, projects, metrics, x-functional dependencies etc. With limited resources at hand you as a leader needs to take a call on getting the priorities right in order to meet the strategic objectives.
Over last more than two decades of my professional experience I’ve gone through several cycles of prioritisation’s across projects in different domains. I’ve seen very closely number of senior leaders doing this prioritisation exercise in varying different ways with different degrees of success. I’m putting here a simple methodology what I’ve seen work the best.
One of the most important thing to do once you have a list of projects and initiatives it to align them cross functionally for execution. The cross functional alignment across various leaders can be time consuming and strenuous. A framework agreed beforehand can go a long way bring these alignments much more easily.
Why is a Project Prioritisation Framework required?
A decision making framework is much easier to discuss and align and I suggest a good amount of time spent doing this in order to make downstream activities much easier.
A framework is easier to discuss as biases on kind and type of projects does not appear at this stage. The proposed and fully aligned framework should be used to evaluate the projects and decide on relative priority without much bias.
What does a good Framework look like?
The decision making project prioritisation framework is basically a frame using multiple perspectives important to a company to evaluate various projects and initiatives to deliver to a strategic objective.
Essentially I recommend having a maximum of 4-5 perspectives. Too many perspectives and you might dilute the overall exercise, while too few may not capture the right essentials.
The perspectives could be different and would depend on your context and industry, some of them could include
- Voice of customer
- Customer experience driver
- Cost of not taking up
- Effort/ cost of delivery
- Time to deliver
- Alignment to next 1/2/3 year strategy
To take care of exceptions, you could also use a business judgement lens as one of the perspectives. Each of these perspectives could be given equal or different weights adding to a 100%
How to use this Framework?
Once the framework perspectives and weights are aligned, and definitely not before; you could start to pass through individual projects and initiatives through it. Start to give a number on a pre-decided scale (lets say 0-5) on each of the perspectives and calculate a weighted score for each project.
The weighted score can be easily sorted to give a relative priority on the projects.
So as you can see a simple framework can go a long way to bring a number based, easily understandable priority list from an ambiguous long list of things to do.
For any questions, please write to me on mohit@moonshotscaling.com
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