Leveraging Data for Project & Program Prioritization

One of the most FUN parts of working at any company is working in project prioritization.  Everyone has their own biases and personal projects which they feel should be higher prioritized.  This activity can be all consuming and has a lot of moving parts which must be considered.  I am sure there are many factors I am forgetting, but below are some key criteria:

• Strategic business objectives linked projects

• Internal political considerations for a proposed project

• Maximizing organizational/project ROI

• Project/Organizational Risk

• Project Cost

• Security/Upgrade Requirements

• Total Project Budget

After weighing all of these factors, typically projects get classified as a “must do”, “nice to have” or lastly “won’t do” where there are more pressing projects in the backlog.  Seeing as these planning sessions directly impact business operations, it is critical to maximize the value in these workshops and leverage data where-ever possible. 

I recently had one of my business stakeholders put this entire process in the correct perspective.  They came to me and asked the simple question “where should my team focus for the next year?” In the prioritization process, there was a set amount of resources dedicated to process optimization and they wanted to leverage process mining to direct their improvement efforts. They did not bias our review or give us pet-project areas they wanted to improve.  As a result, we were able to look enterprise wide for where we saw the most value for these business/technology improvements. 

We started by pulling a number of key enterprise wide metrics that we knew all teams should be working to maximize.  We then ranked all of these opportunities in a chart similar to what is below, so that we got the necessary context and could pick out true outliers.

After a metric was selected, we were able to do a deep dive into the process area leveraging Process Mining and determine insights / root causes.  For instance, we would look at Process Area 5’s cycle time and work to understand if this is being driven by a product, sales org., or maybe a single user.  Additionally, we can quantify this potential improvement in cycle times, cash flow improvement or customer happiness to ensure we are maximizing our ROI. 

As much as process mining is a tool for process improvement, it is equally a tool to manage and drive insights into how processes are performing. Using process data to identify areas of improvement, automation or process redesign is the natural way to leverage Six Sigma Methodologies with a Digital Tool-set. 

I am interested in how others have leveraged process mining in their prioritization matrix.  Feel free to send me a note or reach-out to me if you’d like to share your tips!