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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.
The Cost of Silence Several years ago, I went through one of the most difficult experiences of my professional career. A few weeks before Christmas, our CEO informed my boss that an outside IT consulting firm would be coming in to help evaluate our technology operations. At the time, I was the IT manager. The announcement raised a lot of questions. Why were they being brought in? What were they evaluating? What would happen afterward? Unfortunately, very few answers were provided. Weeks went...
Over the last two weeks, we’ve discussed meetings that run the business and improve the business. Today, let’s examine the third category: meetings that build the team. Before we do, I’d like to share a story. One summer morning at 2:00 AM, our team received an email that would turn into one of the largest technology incidents the world had ever experienced. Nearly every server and computer at our organization and others throughout the world would not power on. As people woke up, they began...
Meetings That Improve the Business Several years ago, our team was dealing with a frustrating login issue. About one person each week would be affected, and the disruption typically lasted only a few minutes. The team responsible for resolving the issue was actively working with the vendor. We held problem-solving sessions, investigated possible causes, and provided daily updates through email and Teams messages. The work was being done. People were understandably frustrated and wanted the...