Prioritization Center of Expertise  

There are three phases to Prioritization:

• The establishment of the foundational prioritization tools
• Their application in the prioritization/approval process
• Approving or rejecting proposals

Foundational prioritization tools

Use of inappropriate tools (and the absence of key tools) immediately compromises the results of your portfolio and, therefore, your strategy. The quality and appropriateness of your prioritization criteria/tools is critical to your success.  As a minimum you need to be able to assess:

• Whether or not a project is truly 'mandatory'
• Each project's exact strategic contribution score and components
• The (net) value of the project
• The risks to the delivery of this value
• That the required capacity (resources) are available when and for how they are required
• Whether the organization has the capability to successfully deliver this type of project

and then

• That the project is set up for success, targeting all of the value and identifying all of the costs

These requirements require several tools that most organizations do not have in place.  In addition, each tool needs to:

• Be able to be easily understood and applied by all project teams
• Be able to be applied consistently to all types of projects
• Produce comparable results (that can be normalized where necessary to ensure consistency)
• Be able to be updated throughout the project’s duration to ensure the project is always a priority

The TOP Prioritization Center of Expertise provides proven tools to establish the foundations. You may already have better tools (eg in the areas of risk and capacity management) that can be retained to reduce the implementation workload. The key is that all of the tools meet the above four criteria.

Application of the prioritization tools

Once you have set up the foundations and established the Strategic Contribution Assessment Tool, implemented the Value Equation and Risk Assessment tools, for example, then you can require each project to ‘score’ itself against the different prioritization criteria on a consistent basis.
When you set up your ‘cut-off’ scores—minimum strategic contribution, minimum value and maximum risk scores, you enable project/governance teams to self-cull their projects when they see they will not be prioritized and approved.
In addition an effective Validation process can ensure the projects are accurately reflected in their proposals and business cases—with excess costs or buried value, high risks or capability gaps, or projects not set up for success being identified for correction before approval.
Any problems found at the business case/validation stage can be rectified then at a lower cost than any time subsequently. It is important that problems are identified and fixed before approval rather than left to later.
Most organizations do not thoroughly validate their proposals for fear this might ‘upset some people’. It will upset some people, but that’s not the objective nor should it be seen as a constraint. The goal is to identify the highest priority relevant, worthwhile and deliverable projects/programs for investment. Some ‘pet’ projects may be discarded through the rigor of the process.

Approving or rejecting proposals

If the preceding steps are implemented effectively the approval process will be simple:

• Some projects will be obvious priorities
• Some projects will be obviously not a priority and can be discarded
• So that the focus can be on those at the margin—whether to approve them or not.

The need for, nature, approach and value of the proposal will have already been validated. The relative comparable prioritization scores will have been computed. The sole question for the Investment Committee is:

“Is this a project we want to do now?”