Business Case Club Blog #2: Identifying a Priority Project
- gbp group
- Sep 18, 2024
- 5 min read
The second blog in our Business Case series focuses on creating a well-structured project prioritisation process to ensure that resources are directed to the most critical and impactful initiatives.
Once your Strategic Vision has been solidified and approved, the next crucial step is Project Prioritisation. This stage is pivotal in the capital allocation process, allowing organisations to decide which projects should be pursued based on their strategic significance, available resources, risks, and potential financial returns.
A well-structured project Prioritisation Process ensures that resources are directed to the most critical and impactful initiatives.
So, before you start:
Have you considered how your project sits within the wider system context?
How critical is it, compared to other local/ similar projects?
How do you evidence that your project is a priority project and the best application of resources?
Here’s a step-by-step guide to conducting a Project Prioritisation process that is both fair and transparent:
1. Define Objectives and Criteria
Clarify Strategic Objectives: Start by clearly defining the organisations’ or system’s strategic goals and objectives. These will serve as the foundation for evaluating and prioritising projects. Hopefully you already have these from your strategic vision work? (see last week’s blog, #1 Strategic Vision)
Establish Evaluation Criteria: Develop a set of criteria that will be used to assess and rank each project. Common criteria include:
- Strategic Alignment - Expected Benefits
- Risk
- Cost and Resource Requirements - Urgency and Time Sensitivity - Dependencies - Stakeholder Impact. ✏️ Top Tip: The evaluation criteria should be shared and agreed with stakeholders at the start of the process.
2. Identify and Collect Project Proposals
Gather strategic/ Project Initiation documents: Collect project proposals from various organisations or teams within the organisation(s). Ensure that each proposal includes key details such as objectives, expected outcomes, resource needs, and timelines.
Standardise Proposal Format: Use a standardised format for project proposals to ensure consistency in the information provided, making it easier to compare and evaluate projects.
3. Project Documentation Analysis
Initial Feasibility review: Conduct a preliminary screening to assess the feasibility of each project. This involves checking whether the project meets basic requirements, such as alignment with strategic goals, availability of key resources, and compliance with guidance or regulatory standards.
Discount non-viable projects: Projects that are not feasible or do not meet the minimum criteria can be excluded from further consideration. This can save time and reduce the amount of work required if some projects can be (justifiably) be discounted early on in the process.
4. Score and Rank Projects
Scoring System: Develop a scoring system to quantitatively assess each project against the established criteria. ✏️ Top Tip: It is useful if you provide a reasonable description of what each score might mean for different criteria, this should help multiple stakeholders to score consistently and ensure a robust process. Also, a discussion around what they might mean in different contexts can be helpful. Developing a robust process at the start can significantly save time during the process but also add credibility and rigour to your result.
Weighted Scoring: Consider applying weights to different criteria based on their relative importance to the organisations’ or system’s strategic objectives.
Calculate Total Scores: Sum the weighted scores for each project to calculate a total score, which can be used to rank the projects from highest to lowest priority.
5. Conduct Risk and Sensitivity Analysis
Risk Assessment: Evaluate the risks associated with each project or programme, including technical, financial, and operational risks. This helps identify projects with high potential risks that might outweigh their benefits.
Sensitivity Analysis: Perform sensitivity analysis to understand how changes in key assumptions (e.g., cost estimates, timelines) could affect the prioritisation. This step helps in assessing the robustness of the prioritisation decisions.
NB: As part of the Economic case for a Business Case, this is often required, and an assessment of changes in key levers such certain costs, risks and benefits is undertaken to see by how far these need to move to change the preference (To be covered in week 7 in our Business Case series).
6. Review Resource Availability
Resource: Assess the availability of key resources (capital and revenue budget, personnel, technology) required to execute the projects. Ensure that the organisation or system has the capacity to support the prioritised projects. Also check the resources available for managing the overall prioritisation process and consider whether you need to draft in some help!
7. System-wide Stakeholder Collaboration
System-wide working groups: Engage key stakeholders from multiple organisations and departments/ services, including executives, department/ service leads, project teams and support teams, to review the prioritised list of projects. Gather feedback on the prioritisation decisions and address any concerns or suggestions.
System Support: Work to build consensus among stakeholders on the final list of prioritised projects. This step ensures buy-in and support for the selected projects. ✏️ Top Tip: We’ve found that this is more easily facilitated in face-to-face workshops, allowing for more focus, social interaction and open discussion.
8. Finalise Prioritisation
Approval of the priority projects: Present the final prioritised list of projects to the relevant boards for approval – this may require local and national approval. Ensure that the decision-makers understand the rationale behind the prioritisation. ✏️ Top Tip: A well-structured PID or other document which sets out the methodology can be really helpful, so you can share with people who may join throughout the process – this can help ensure consistency and bring a wide range of stakeholder/ participants up to speed.
Document approval: Obtain formal approval for the selected projects and record it. This may involve authorising budgets, assigning project resource, and setting project timelines.
9. Communicate Results
Effective communication: Communicate the results of the prioritisation process to all relevant stakeholders, including the rationale for why certain projects were prioritised over others.
10. Monitor and review
Ongoing Monitoring: Regularly monitor the progress of the approved projects to ensure they stay on track and continue to align with strategic goals. Adjust priorities as necessary based on changes in the environment or the needs of the organisation.
Post Process Review: Provide a forum for stakeholders to give feedback on the prioritisation process. This helps to refine and improve the process for future prioritisations and address any concerns.
Review and Update Prioritisation: Periodically, review the prioritisation process and update it as required. This may involve re-evaluating projects based on new guidance and regulations, business needs and system priorities.
11. Plan for Contingencies
Contingency Planning: Develop contingency plans for high-priority projects in case of unexpected changes or delays, such as resource shortages or shifts in strategic priorities. This ensures that critical projects can proceed, even in challenging circumstances.
12. Document the Process
Documentation: The process and the decisions throughout the prioritisation process should be documented in a final report and summarised in the organisations’ or system’s strategy.
⭐Success Story: Devon ICS Priorisation Process
Although no business case is being prepared (yet!), we have supported a number of health systems with this process, helping them to define and agree their priorities (see Devon ICS Prioritisation process case study). This work can be vital for those projects which are progressed for investment and therefore require a business case. As ever, robust effective work at the beginning can pay dividends as the project progresses!
So, by following a robust and fair process, organisations can develop a systematic and transparent project prioritisation process that ensures resources are allocated to the most strategically valuable initiatives and can help manage the many and varied competing projects. This process helps to maximise the impact of projects, improving alignment with organisational and system goals, and enhancing overall project success rates.
Need help now?
Arrange a conversation with our expert Business Case Team. Contact Ian Sabini, Managing Consultant on: ian@gbpconsult.co.uk
Coming up next in our series of Business Case Club Blogs:
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