Prioritizing Projects
At any given time a company may have several project management life cycles going on simultaneously. To accomplish this juggling act, it’s important to decide which projects have priority. The most important projects must finish on time with resources kept in tact. Projects can be prioritized by following a few simple steps.
First of all, a criteria for defining a project’s importance should be developed. Projects that are critical to the business strategy should be given a higher priority than those that have little to do with overall goals. If there is no clear business strategy, other criteria should be considered, such as the dependence of other projects on this one, the amount of risk involved, the number of resources to be consumed or the project’s potential for success.
The next step is to match the criteria against each project and identify any gaps. It is possible that some projects which might have been thought to be a perfect fit really aren’t and others that weren’t considered important might need to be marked as high priority. In project management it is sometimes tempting to go for the “fun” projects, but personal preferences should be set aside.
It might be helpful to come up with a method of ranking projects as either high, medium, or low priority. Once all projects have been grouped, more care can be taken with projects categorized as high and spare resources can be allocated to these projects.
By using this strategy, project management life cycles can be better managed with an increased chance of overall success.
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