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Escaping the Everything in Progress Trap - Part 3 - Assessing What to Do
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The last couple of weeks we have talked about pull systems and how to set them up in Microsoft Planner. When deciding what to work on next as a team, it’s important to assess strategic alignment, business value and return on investment, technical feasibility, resource availability, risk profile, stakeholder support, timeline/urgency, and regulatory and compliance areas. One can do this by considering the following questions and scoring the area on a 1-5 scale (5 being aligned with the criteria, 1 being not well aligned). Strategic Alignment: Does this project directly support the organization’s strategy, OKRs, or declared annual priorities? Business Value/ROI: What is the expected financial return, cost reduction, revenue generation, or operational improvement? Is it high, low, or negative? Technical Feasibility: Is the required technology proven and accessible? Does the team have the skills to execute? Resource Availability: Are budget, people, and tooling accessible without major reallocation or new hiring? Risk Profile: What is the overall project risk across technical, financial, schedule, and delivery dimensions? (Score inversely — low risk = high score). Stakeholder Support: What is the level of executive sponsorship, team buy-in, and support from impacted stakeholders. Strong, good, limited, opposed? Timeline/Urgency: What is the time sensitivity and urgency? Is it a regulatory deadline, market window, competitive pressure, or internal need? Answering these questions can give you a good idea on if a project should be started. For a more detailed assessment scorecard, grab our free Basic Project Decisioning Scorecard by clicking here. In addition to letting you score each of these criterion, you can also put a weight on them and make notes and automatically get an assessment on if you should start on the project or work item. PS: Want a more advanced scorecard? Right now, the first 50 purchasers can get the same scorecard The Outlier Team uses to assess projects and work items to start for 50% off here. After that, the price returns to normal at $24.99. |
The Outlier Team
We help small businesses with technology, strategy, and leadership and have a passion for sharing what we have learned. Subscribe to our newsletter to get helpful weekly content.
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