


I also have a running to-do list in Asana of tasks that haven’t made it onto my calendar yet. I write my daily to-do list in my daily planner. With your initiatives thus prioritized in a logical and reasoned manner, you’re in good stead to start planning the implementation and delivery of each initiative to reach your strategic goals.I don’t know about you, but I almost always have more on my to-do list than I can possibly get done.
#Priority matrix personal series
If you imagine a series of curved bands radiating from the top right corner towards the bottom left corner, then working from left to right and top to bottom is generally the priority order for your initiatives. To this end, the quadrants are labelled Challenge, Implement, Possible and Reconsider (clockwise from top left). The quadrant into which it falls should help to determine the priority for its investment or implementation. Once you have determined an initiative’s value and risk, you can plot it on the 2×2 prioritization matrix in relation to all the other initiatives. Prioritize the Evaluated Initiatives on the 2×2 Prioritization Matrix Priority Categories For example, failing to implement a business change required to meet legislative compliance requirements can be a significant risk to the organization’s licence to operate. At the initial planning stage, this will probably be your best guestimate, as you are unlikely to have a good understanding of the complexity, effort or cost early on.īusiness risk takes into account the risk of not implementing an initiative in addition to the risks of implementing it (delivery risk). The delivery risk of an initiative assesses the potential impact of implementing it based on complexity, effort and cost. There are two common considerations when evaluating an initiative’s risk: How do you determine an initiative’s risk? profit, revenue, margin, cashflow, funds, etc. The more the initiative increases the value proposition to your customers, the higher the value.Īn initiative has more value when it positively impacts the organization’s preferred financial measures, e.g. There are too many measures of value to list, but here are three definitions of value which are commonly applied to prioritization of initiatives:Īssuming your strategic goals are right, then the initiatives most aligned with these will deliver higher value. saving lives) are very different from those of a publicly listed bank (e.g.
#Priority matrix personal drivers
Each organization’s value drivers can vary vastly for example, the value drivers of a non-profit (e.g. The measures of an initiative’s value are usually tied to your organization’s value drivers.

How do you determine an initiative’s value? Just ensure that you are consistent and apply the same definition of value and risk when evaluating each initiative. The complexity of how you evaluate the value and risk of an initiative is up to you, relative to the level of sophistication and accuracy required and effort afforded. Using value and risk as the evaluation criteria is key to substantiating where initiatives should sit in the list of priorities. The resulting visualization is a far more compelling tool for building consensus and identifying the initiatives that just aren’t quite right. With the matrix, you plot initiatives into one of the four quadrants by evaluating their value and risk. There’s nothing wrong with this - but you can easily transform it into something far more visual and quick to interpret.Ī more effective (yet still simple) method for prioritizing initiatives is the two-by-two (2×2) prioritization matrix. The go-to evaluation method for many organizations is a simple spreadsheet. Evaluate your Initiatives Classic Spreadsheets This will always put the success of the strategic vision at risk.Įvaluating and prioritizing is vital.

Instead, they dive straight into implementation. However, they then spend insufficient attention on building a prioritization matrix for these initiatives. We’ve seen that most organizations are capable of creating a list of projects or initiatives based on a strategic vision or set of goals. Less surprisingly, prioritization done well can be the difference between success and failure - which makes it all the more mystifying when so many don’t have a firm handle on prioritization. A surprising number of organizations are woefully inadequate at using a prioritization matrix for their projects or initiatives.
