Project Prioritization Frameworks that Work
Tactics for maximizing institutional value in project evaluation
This report profiles tactics that make IT project prioritization decisions faster, fairer, and better aligned to institutional strategic needs. Institutions can achieve these goals by more carefully shaping prioritization body workloads, assessing projects in a uniform manner, and reducing the potential for project assessment bias.
In 2019, the IT Forum launched our Functional Collaborative on IT Project Management. About 55 project management leaders came together to discuss and seek advice about how to control project demand on campus and how to accurately prioritize projects.
Project prioritization demands a common understanding among prioritization participants of the characteristics that make a project valuable to the institution. A process of applying such criteria must also overcome the natural biases and special interests of project requesters and approvers alike.
The IT organization’s responsibility is to provide prioritization tools for standardized review, select and train participants to promote an institutional perspective, and ingrain a culture of accountability in prioritization decisions.
This executive brief—written for CIOs, project management directors, and IT governance participants—profiles tactics that make IT project prioritization decisions faster, fairer, and better aligned to institutional strategic needs. Institutions can achieve these goals by more carefully shaping prioritization body workloads, uniformly assessing projects, and reducing the potential for project assessment bias.
5 ways to use this research:
- Establish criteria for determining which project requests require formal prioritization
- Communicate project cost, impact, and risk with prioritization participants
- Create standardized project evaluation criteria for prioritization bodies
- Ensure projects are prioritized based on the institutional value
- Address systemic bias or favoritism in the prioritization process
"“Our first step of review is to score how difficult a project will be to deliver. The scores sort projects into tiers to identify the support each needs.”
"Director, Project Management Office
Private Research University
Practice 1: Request Filtering for Prioritization Bodies
Project requests are assessed to determine appropriate decision pathways. Simple preapproval scorecards or prioritization matrices sort requests into tiers that determine whether IT management or a governance body has the final say about approval and priority. Characteristics that typically distinguish between approval paths include the technical versus business or academic nature of the project, cost and effort required, and whether a non-discretionary compliance issue is involved.
Practice 2: Standardized Project Assessment Rubrics
While pre-approval scorecards are useful for determining decision pathways, it’s also advisable to provide downstream prioritization participants with scoring rubrics focused broadly on institutional value. These rubrics clarify which characteristics are institutionally important and assure that projects are evaluated on consistency and transparency. Criteria are tailored to the university’s strategic vision and resources.
Practice 3: Game-Free Project Evaluation
To minimize the possibility of biased evaluations or rules evasion, prioritization participants are selected for commitment to institutional benefit rather than as representatives of a particular unit. When prioritization decisions are in progress, project evaluation scores contributed by participants are made visible to the whole governance body. Finally, IT or the PMO periodically review scores for signs of favoritism.
Decision Guide: Selecting Project Prioritization Tactics for Your Institution
Use our decision guide worksheets to decide whether the tactics above might work for your institution and to develop implementation action plans.
IT leaders use these worksheets as a backbone for focused working sessions at staff and task force meetings. We recommend that IT leaders distribute the report to the relevant stakeholders as pre-reading to establish a common vocabulary and fact base, then spend time going through the worksheets to consider the applicability and resource requirements of the practices in this brief.
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