Develop Project Prioritization and Selection Criteria
Desires dictate our priorities, priorities shape our choices, and choices determine our actions.
—Dallin H. Oaks
Once the performance scorecards have been developed for all areas in the organization, teams brainstorm ideas to identify projects and initiatives to be undertaken for achieving measures chosen in their scorecards. In the enthusiasm to achieve the objectives of their new scorecards, the number of project ideas quickly adds up. Suddenly it becomes overwhelming for teams to prioritize and select the ones they should implement. Most organizations regularly struggle with this problem as they are challenged with limited resource availability.
In Chapters 13 and 14 I will share, through a real case example, how to create and use a standard prioritization and project selection criteria that provide equity across all areas to allocate manpower and financial resources for implementing projects. The process ensures that the projects implemented in different areas are aligned to positively impact the big dot measures at the organization level.
Problem: The inventory of all projects, big and small across Hospital Heal, stood at a staggering count of 634. Every project was deemed important. The other challenge was that the criteria for project selection varied among teams and there was little clarity on the impact the project had on other functional areas or on the overall performance of the organization.
Solution: Senior Executive team and council members of More Time to Care, who represented all critical areas of the hospital, discussed and agreed to standardize classification of all projects using the PICK chart triaging process (Figures 13.1 and 13.2). The following three project categories were standardized (visually represented in Figure 13.3):
Just do it (JDI): Part of incremental change, where an individual or a small working group within a local area comes together to implement the improvement idea in less than four weeks.
Continuous-improvement project (CI): Part of transitional change that requires more than four weeks but less than six months to implement. This type of project needs a charter to be developed and resources to be assigned for implementation. The project may impact one or more functional areas but does not require any capital investment approval from the financial committee.
Organization-wide project: Part of transitional change in which a project charter is developed, resources are allocated, and the change is implemented within a twelve-month period. Longer-duration projects are broken down into smaller, more manageable phases. The project typically impacts more than one functional area and needs capital investment approval from the financial committee.
Project Prioritization Criteria
Once the project fell under the continuous-improvement or organization-wide category, it had to compete against other projects to qualify for resource allocation. Filters (standardized criteria) for project selection were established, weights were provided for each criterion (total weights of all filters add to 100% as shown in Table 13.1). Each filter was defined at three levels—high, medium, and low—with the objective of creating value. Value was numerically defined as benefit divided by effort, which meant to increase the value you can either increase the numerator (benefit) or reduce the denominator (effort). For filters that contributed to increasing the numerator, the high was rated as 5 and the low was rated as 1. For filters that contributed to reducing the denominator, high was rated as 1 and the low was rated as 5. Operational definitions for criteria were created to prioritize projects across the organization. Examples of project filters and their operational definitions are shared in Table 13.2. The results of the solution are shared in the next chapter.
Sensei Gyaan: Limit the total number of filters (benefit filters + effort filters) to a maximum of six. Avoid giving equal weights to all filters to reflect relative importance ( Table 13.3). When choosing filters, do not identify filters that only increase the numerator (benefit). Give due consideration for identifying filters that also reduce the denominator (effort) to increase overall value.
Table 13.3 Example of Poor Organizational Focus: 10 Filters with Equal Weights
