{"id":30098,"date":"2023-01-14T01:14:19","date_gmt":"2023-01-14T01:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2023\/01\/14\/7-easy-steps-to-prioritize-projects\/"},"modified":"2023-01-14T01:14:19","modified_gmt":"2023-01-14T01:14:19","slug":"7-easy-steps-to-prioritize-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2023\/01\/14\/7-easy-steps-to-prioritize-projects\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Easy Steps to Prioritize Projects"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For all that your project management software can do for you, it still requires your input to know what to prioritize. Your PM software can only account for variables such as your resource pool, internal politics, organizational inefficiency, and shifting priorities if you set the parameters and importance of those elements or others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, your projects keep piling up and you\u2019re still expected to deliver on time and under budget. What you need is a system for prioritizing your projects. This way, you can keep stakeholders happy by delivering quality work on time and keep yourself sane through an organized approach. We\u2019ve created this guide to help you convert your pile of work into a digestible list of projects and priorities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Step 1 \u2013 List All Your Projects\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Start with the obvious: list everything you have to do that\u2019s currently on your plate. This means pulling all your work items and project requests from different sources like your email inbox, Slack messages, project management software platforms, personal notes, and recommendations from bosses and colleagues.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Check all your sources and create a master list of all projects. Use a medium you\u2019re comfortable with at first, whether that\u2019s a note-taking app, a spreadsheet, or just good old pen and paper.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You might want to exclude some things from your prioritization list, like mandatory projects for compliance or legal regulations (making them inherently one of the most important things to do) or routine tasks that will never supplant other projects in terms of priority. You don\u2019t need to score these projects during this process\u2013just plug them into the final list when you\u2019re done, starting with the most objectively important one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Step 2 \u2013 Determine Criteria for Priority<\/h2>\n

With your master list in place, you now need to set a rubric for how to measure and compare the importance of each project to one another. While many organizations focus on financial benefits such as cost-cutting and return on investment (ROI), not all reasons for urgency are quantitative like that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For example, projects that produce qualitative benefits such as customer satisfaction and strategic alignment are equally important and often overlooked when taking a strictly financial view of the project value.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s break down the different types of criteria you can apply to assign importance to your list of projects:<\/p>\n

Financial: <\/strong>Consider the costs and financial rewards for completing projects and project elements. The main idea is to attach a cost to each project, allowing you to determine whether you have the budget to handle them simultaneously or at all. You can also tie revenue to the completion of projects and scope priority based on the greatest reward.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Strategic: <\/strong>These can be less tangible than financial criteria or just benefits that are hard to tie directly to expenditure or profit. These may include market research, process development, or resource management. While time can often be reduced to a financial criteria (often in terms of paid or billable hours), sometimes it may be a better metric for strategic considerations, such as building out your business processes in terms of what can get done fastest or what has to be done for other items to be completed.<\/p>\n

Risk: <\/strong>It\u2019s important to appropriately prioritize projects in alignment with your company\u2019s appetite for risk. Risk factors can also act as tiebreakers for projects with identical scores, with the less risky option getting the higher priority. Similarly, high risk or a multitude of risk factors can lower the priority of an otherwise high-value project.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is important to involve stakeholders when determining your criteria, whether that entails department heads, executives, and project management offices or business analysts, clients, and subject matter experts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ask your team to brainstorm ideas for criteria to measure your projects against. Start with the three categories above and drill down into the unique considerations of your business to find meaningful criteria.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We recommend no more than nine criteria be used, but most organizations will benefit from keeping this to around four or five. There are also many data sources to help you identify the appropriate criteria for scoring your projects, such as:\u00a0<\/p>\n