In my professional life, I serve as a consultant on several projects at any time. Part of my role in relation to the management of this project portfolio is to provide input on prioritization. All organizations have limited resources to spend on projects and analytical tools can help inform decisions leaders are faced with in regards where to allocate these resources.
One such tool that I developed and have used successfully is a project scorecard that analyzes several dimensions of a project, assigns a relative weight to each dimension, and provides a recommend project rank based on the overall score of a project. This particular scorecard looks at the following project dimensions:
- Number of departments impacted
- Revenue impact
- Quality impact
- Safety impact
- Project sponsor
- Projected cost
- Urgency
- Priority
- Budgeted
- Security
- Interfaces
- Existing installations (in other divisions of the company)
Based on your needs or organization, the dimensions analyzed would vary greatly, but the value behind the tool would not. Furthermore, I would not recommend making decisions based solely on a tool such as this, but would use its outputs as one data point (although, perhaps, one that carries a great deal of weight).
Are you in need of having a tool like this built for your organization or do you have other questions as to how a tool such as this could be implemented? Please contact me for more information.
Related files: Project Scorecard
