Prioritize the IT Projects that Best Serve Your Institution
Demand for IT projects and services frequently exceeds the resources available in IT organizations to execute them. It’s critical to select the projects that contribute the most value to the institution, but many colleges and universities are plagued with chaotic project intake processes, backlogs of requests whose status is unclear, and weak or nonexistent methods for prioritizing proposals. IT units can address these problems by rationalizing the project intake process, clearing out unproductive backlogs, and applying robust, standardized criteria for project prioritization.
Choosing the right projects requires assembling a complete view of IT project demand and applying fair, consistent evaluation criteria. But historical bad habits and immature processes can undermine these foundational requirements.
CIOs must identify and confront problems such as informal project request and approval mechanisms, unclear evaluation criteria, and unofficial back-door approval paths. This won’t be easy: some customers and even IT staff may prefer familiar ad hoc project processes to more mature ones.
To get a better understanding of project prioritization options and possibilities, watch our webconference to learn about the results of the IT Forum’s Project Management Functional Collaborative.
The 55 project management leaders who participated in the collaborative shared experience and practices spanning a wide range of institutional sizes and types. Their advice in brief: deploy simple but uniform project intake processes, standardize evaluation frameworks, and structure prioritization body participation to prevent gaming or circumvention of the approval process.
Ad hoc project intake processes allow project requests to stream into the IT organization from many directions, making it difficult to assemble a complete picture of project demand or to allocate resources efficiently or fairly. To set the stage for effective project prioritization, CIOs must first clean up and rationalize legacy project pipelines that have become unmanageable.
The next step is to implement intake processes that collect all project requests and capture sufficient information about them to permit evaluation and prioritization. The reformed intake processes must be transparent and straightforward, so that customers aren’t tempted to bypass them. Read our executive brief to learn more about managing the IT project pipeline.
Actions that may be necessary to address project intake problems include resetting a disorderly legacy project portfolio, developing a standardized intake process, triaging project requests to weed out non-viable proposals, and working with customer units to shape project demand. Use our project demand management decision guide to identify the practices and implementation requirements that apply to your institution.
Without a common understanding of what makes a project valuable to the institution, even the most robust project intake processes leave open the possibility that local interests and biases will govern project approval.
IT leaders must establish the principle that institutional needs take precedence in project approval decisions. Small or purely technical projects, or those mandated for regulatory reasons, may bypass formal prioritization, but other projects should be evaluated in a transparent process using standard rubrics that facilitate comparison on items including strategic contribution, risk, and potential ROI. Take care to ensure that participants take a holistic approach and do not play favorites when making decisions.
Tactics that help establish a robust project prioritization process include using filtering criteria to determine which projects require formal prioritization, standardized project assessment rubrics and governance body selection and review processes that ensure game-free project evaluation. Use our project prioritization decision guide to identify the practices and implementation requirements that apply to your institution.
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