Many businesses suffer from poor prioritization. They lack the skills and resources to know how to best organize their projects, leading to failures and missed business goals. To prevent these outcomes, you must implement good project prioritization to appropriately align your resources to your more successful projects.
The best way to use project prioritization is to use the right project prioritization tool and method for the job. With the right tool, you have a useable project prioritization matric that will help you find the best outcomes for your projects.
By reading further, you will learn the most common prioritization tools and methods and how to implement them into your operations.
Why Use Project Prioritization?
Effective project portfolio management takes skill, but the lack of quality information can lead to missed opportunities, overruns, failed projects, and very inefficient resource management. Project prioritization helps make projects more cost-effective by showing you which projects are more important than others.
Project prioritization helps you:
- Quantify the value of your projects
- Align projects to your strategy
- Focus project teams on business benefits
- Balance project volume for productivity
While all organizations utilize some form of project prioritization. many of them see project prioritization as just a budgeting process. However, it is much more than that. A well-structured prioritization process can reveal changes in your business environment before they happen so you can make the necessary changes to meet the new demands.
Select the Right Project Prioritization Tool and Method
Project prioritization works best when you use the right prioritization method for your organization. Using the wrong method can have serious consequences down the line. Therefore, you want the one that best fits your needs. To that end, you must also know your prioritization options:
- Ranking – the most common and simplest prioritization method processes projects by a set of criteria.
- MoSCoW – projects get sorted based on the needs of stakeholders
- Kano – Projects are completed based on end-user satisfaction
- Net Present Value – ranks projects based on potential changes in revenue
- Payback period – ranks based on the time required to recoup investments
- Scoring – a flexible method that calculates priority scores based on weighted criteria
Selecting the right prioritization method can be as challenging as project prioritization itself. It requires assessing your origination, industry, and your projects to find what would work best in your situation. Fortunately, you can use a project prioritization tool to gain the insights you need. The right tool can help you establish cross-functional teams, maintain product strategies, and professionally prioritize your projects.
When to Use a Project Prioritization Matrix
A project prioritization matrix is one such tool. At its heart, is a scoring method tool where you score projects onto a spreadsheet, based on a set of criteria, but it can do much more. Its main benefit is that it provides the weighted proprieties in an easy-to-use and understandable format. You can even tweak the criteria on the fly, giving you immediate insights into how your projects stack under different sorting methods.
However, prioritization matrices are not recommended for sorting critical, complex projects that need dedicated planning. Still, they are the perfect tool for sort tasks with no long-term requirements.
Conclusion
If you need help deciding on a project portfolio management solution for your organization, feel free to contact us today. Our representatives will work with you to evaluate your projects to see which prioritization methods would work best in your situation. They can even offer advice on which project prioritization tools can lead you to more successful projects.