2. Introduction
The Evolution of Prioritization
Prioritizing projects can be a difficult, politically charged process, resulting in a
portfolio with mixed support and difficulties in execution. Or, it can be an
efficient process creating a shared vision and understanding for your whole
team. LeverSource provides tools and an approach to upgrade your process to
the latter.
Most project prioritization happens in one of three ways: ‘what I say goes’, ‘oiling
the squeaky wheel’ or some form of group voting. Let’s take a quick look at
each to really understand the case for changing to a dynamic impact / execution
driven approach.
What I say goes
This is a fairly straightforward process. The boss decides what projects we are
executing—end of story. Of course there is likely some in-
put or discussion with other stakeholders, but the final de-
cision rests in the corner office. This is efficient in terms of
decision-making, but is driven by a myopic view of the mar-
ketplace and organization. The resulting portfolio probably
doesn’t have a lot of support from the rest of the team creat-
ing minimal desire to execute.
Oiling the squeaky wheel
The loudest voice gets priority. This can manifest
itself in a few ways: the largest revenue centers
demand the lion’s share of resources, star
performers getting favoritism or making everyone
happy and giving each stakeholder their 1 or 2
biggest desires. The problem with this is that there
is no vision for how things are connected. Dependencies are an afterthought and
there is no formal mechanism for amplifying mutual benefits between efforts. At
the very least the portfolio isn’t focused and your organization’s resources are
spread too thin.
Group Voting
This approach can be as simple as a
show of hands around a table or as
complicated as 10 page
spreadsheets with a variety of
prioritization criteria. We’ve all seen
these spreadsheets: Enter a score of
1 – 5 for how well this project meets
our strategic objectives, improves
morale, lowers risk, etc. Perhaps
there is even some effort on
spreading projects across a growth
vs. process improvement vs.
maintenance focus so your
organization is making head way in each area.
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3. Of the three approaches ‘group voting’ with some variety of prioritization
criteria is the most advanced. At least we begin to think about what makes proj-
ects ‘important’ and try to arrive at some objective result. Unfortunately, we find
several issues even with this approach:
So we need to move past these ways into the era of collective wisdom. Collabo-
rate to triage your pain-points, desired changes and understand how your limit-
ed resources can bring the greatest benefit.
The Next Evolution
For the project prioritization and portfolio selection process to be successful it
must lead to the following outcomes:
What is required to achieve these four outcomes?
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The process is transparent, but not objective and not everyone will
whole-heartedly agree. Either they don’t agree with the criteria, the arbitrary
weighting placed on the criteria or the scores assigned to each project.
This disagreement leads to horse-trading and the discussion will likely revert
back to ‘oiling the squeaky wheel’ and maybe even ‘what I say goes’.
You don’t necessarily end up with ‘the biggest bang for the buck’ projects.
You likely don’t know the downstream impact of each project to determine
the benefit to the whole organization.
Finally, the results aren’t always executable. Dependencies aren’t tracked and
foundational efforts and other prerequisites might get left out of the mix.
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Getting the most out of our finite
resources
Having a selection of projects that are
executable by our organization
Having the backing and support of
stakeholders
Being able to explain and defend the decisions to the board, executives or
team
We need a method that solves the shortcomings of each approach: We must understand the issues facing our organization and sequence
how we address those issues in a way that builds momentum, starting
a chain reaction of implementing desired changes.
We must prioritize projects based on the pain points they alleviate,
changes they implement and dependencies between projects.
Plan for execution by knowing the financial requirements and timing as
well as the skills, roles or individuals required for each project to appro-
priately plan around their bandwidth.
Explain the portfolio and gain stakeholder agreement by using a
logical and transparent process to articulate why projects are
prioritized the way they are and show how each stakeholder benefits.
Use tools to collect, analyze and present all of this information to re-
duce the duration and expense of your planning efforts.
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4. How to make it happen
Bringing this Holy Grail together is achievable with the right method and tools.
The steps are as follows:
The devil is in the details. Let’s dig into each step for more information on
making this real.
Involve all stakeholders from the beginning
Hopefully this step isn’t new or shocking. Planning isn’t done in a vacuum and
by involving our stakeholders early and often we increase the chances of getting
their full support by the end. Here we interview or hold workshops with
stakeholders to identify:
1. Their key issues or pain points
2. What they want to see change about the organization
3. Top goals or plans
We have some great tips and tricks for getting this information, but what you do
with this information is the key to planning a great portfolio.
Logical and Transparent Triage
Now we have a large collection of 20 – 70 pain points / changes, what do we do
with them? Imagine being able to visually show how one issue is connected (or
not) to all of the other issues raised during your discovery sessions. Our Issue
Architect® application provides a quick way to collect and identify connections
between the various issues and changes communicated by your stakeholders.
It can visually show the inputs / prerequisites to solve an issue as well as the
downstream impacts of removing that issue from your organization.
Red items are inputs to increasing service quality and green items are downstream impacts
of improving service quality
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Involve all stakeholders from the beginning
Triage their issues and desired changes in a transparent
and logical way
Develop or collect projects that address the key sequence
of changes
Create high level business cases and resource plans
Shift project timing based on results
Communicate, communicate, communicate and execute
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5. Using connections between issues, we can visually see how they might be
broken into four categories:
Leverageable Items: These items can and should be addressed right
away because they have minimal prerequisites and many positive
downstream impacts.
Outcomes / Dashboard Items: These items have many inputs and
very few downstream impacts. This means you couldn’t setup a single
project to fully improve these items. They are completely improved by
addressing several prerequisite issues. That makes these items great to
put on a dashboard to measure your progress along the way. Think of
items like flexibility, morale, customer satisfaction, etc.
Complex / Strategic Items: These items have many prerequisites and
also have many downstream impacts. That means they may need to be
addressed incrementally over a period of time, but once the inputs are
improved and the issue itself is improved, numerous downstream
issues are also improved.
One Offs: These items have few inputs and few downstream impacts.
That means for the most part they aren’t as connected to the
core issues facing the organization. Because of this, these items can be
addressed at any time.
Now we must consider dependencies and sequence these items for the impact
they provide and start our chain reaction of implementing positive changes.
Text based version of how pain points are triaged into 4 categories
A brief breakdown of the sequence to address these issues is as follows:
1. Start with issues in the Leverageable items category and any necessary
inputs of these items.
2. Move to the complex / strategic items. The Leverageable items are likely
inputs to these items. Pick any needed prerequisites to these issues as well.
3. Select items to solve from the one offs category. You can stick with the most
Leverageable of these or give these up as political bargaining chips by picking
the most frequently mentioned issues or satisfy the pain point of a squeaky
wheel.
The Issue Architect® application automatically breaks down this sequence
using the full report feature. It also paints a path for each stakeholder of how and
when his or her key issues are addressed.
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6. Develop or collect projects that address the key sequence
As indicated, there are two options here. We can develop projects to solve the
key issues in the sequence and triage or we can match a pool of existing
potential projects to the sequence to prioritize.
With either approach we connect projects to issues that they improve and use
this information along with the sequence of pain points to prioritize our
projects. The projects that float to the top are the most Leverageable / provide
the biggest bang for the buck to the organization.
In this example, the orange changes are improved by the SOA project
A quick sample of business case output
To increase the transparency and make project decisions defensible,
Issue Architect® can visually show what issues are solved by any given project.
This helps easily answer the question “why are we doing this project”?
Develop Business Cases and Resource Plans
Now that we have collected issues, sequenced addressing them for a chain reac-
tion of changes and identified the project to do so, we have to make sure they are
financially viable and that we have the resources to execute them.
On the finances side we collect four pieces of information:
1. One-time costs
2. Ongoing costs
3. One time benefits
4. Ongoing benefits
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7. We also need to identify who is needed to execute these projects and make sure
they have the bandwidth to do so. For each project, select the resource or role
needed and when they are needed. The LeverSource application then produces
dynamic reports showing if / when resources are over committed.
These pieces of information allow you to shift around project start dates to find
the optimal roadmap for execution.
Communicate and Execute
Each step in this process provides the opportunity to update and discuss results
with your stakeholders. By this final step they should be well versed in how the
portfolio was built, how projects were prioritized, which pain points should be
addressed first and why. The core of the story is outlined and you are free to add
in anecdotes from customer feedback or strategic planning sessions to bring it
all together.
A sample view of resource conflicts supplied by LeverSource
Bringing it to Life
If you’re ready to bring more clarity and results to your project prioritization or
portfolio planning process, we are ready to help.
For a deeper discussion or to request a demo / more information, please reach
out to:
Kellay Buckelew - Kellay@LeverSource.com
Don Frazier, Ph.D. – Don@LeverSource.com
Visit us at LeverSource.com for more information
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