Selecting the “right” processes, products, and projects’ tasks to prioritize within an organization is a critical portfolio management challenge for every business entity seeking to improve its ROI (be it profit or end-user benefits). There is no reconciliation between the intuitive methods used by organizations, and a scientific method that considers the relevant criteria in making a financially sound decision. In nearly all organizations, even Fortune 500 organizations, there is a lack of scientific method ranking processes, products, and projects and then allocating resources to the resulting prioritized list to assure the organization continuously maximizes its labor investment.

So, what happens in most organizations? Usually, staff members are encouraged to submit their ideas for new or improved processes, products, and projects. The new idea generally involves a discussion with their supervisor. Then, either the supervisor or staff member writes a Business Case of 5-20 pages discussing what the process, product, and project entail, its estimated costs and expected return on investment. The CEO, President, Managing Director, or Owner usually appoints two to ten members of their organization’s key executives to form a “Steering Committee.” Each idea sponsor makes a brief presentation approximately five minutes before the Steering Committee. The “Steering Committee” might have 100-250 annually submitted Business Cases in large organizations. The selection process usually lasts one to three weeks and occurs once or twice a year. The current selection model: this model, with minor variances, is what most organizations use. What are the methods’ problems? Even more importantly, can these problems be solved?

1. Criteria: Organizations fail to use a reasonable set of criteria to rank their processes, products, and projects. Most organizations use cost and ROI as criteria, it is difficult, if not impossible, to consistently make prudent decisions that assure your organization will maximize its ROI using just two criteria.
2. Frequecy: The world changes every day. What is a good selection today, may not be a good selection tomorrow? Organizations need to daily assess the ranking of their processes, products, projects, and issues. There is a poker adage that says, “don’t throw good money after bad money.” The same holds for processes, products, and projects. Even though you have invested $50,000 in startup funds for an estimated $1,000,000 project with an expected ROI of $1,800,000 ROI if the ROI changes to $980,000, continuing with the project does not make financial sense. When an issue occurs in one of your crucial revenue-producing products, how do you balance the effort to resolve this issue with other ongoing projects, processes, and products? The world changes every day. What is a good selection today, may not be a good selection tomorrow? There is a poker adage that says, “don’t throw good money after bad money.” The same holds for processes, products, and projects. Even though you have invested $50,000 in startup funds for an estimated $1,000,000 project with an expected ROI of $1,800,000 ROI if the ROI changes to $980,000, continuing with the project does not make financial sense. When an issue occurs in one of your crucial revenue-producing products, how do you balance the effort to resolve this issue with other ongoing projects, processes, and products? Organizations need to daily assess the ranking of their processes, products, projects, and issues.
3. Expertize: The selection committee is usually extremely bright; they often are not the organization’s expert evaluators in their criterion. Experience in the specific criterion is critical in ranking a process, product, project, or issue.
4. Politics: In the business world, many decisions are not logical. Too often, politics plays a significant a role in which tasks are selected as critical. Optimize Workflow team members have seen a sponsor who was a “golf” buddy of a key executive who had his project chosen over another individual whose project was far superior in terms of the organization’s future revenues but had no close association with any Steering Committee members.

So how does the Optimize product solve these critical problems with a process, product, or project selection?

1. Criteria: Instead of two criteria, the Optimize product has thirty-two built-in criteria. Organizations can also add their criteria. Each criterion has a weight factor allowing organizations to decide each criterion’s importance relative to each other criterion.
2. Frequecy: In the Optimize product processes, products, and projects are ranked every day. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) evaluate their criterion against a set of processes, products, and projects. Whenever a change in the environment occurs relative to a criterion, the SME can adjust their score for a process, product, and project. A process, product, and project’s ranking are a sum of all the criterion’s weight times their activity’s score. Thus, executives know daily the ranking of their process, product, and project and can make prudent, intelligent decisions daily
3. Expertize: When specifying each criterion’s weight (importance), Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are appointed to continuously evaluate each of their designated processes, products, and projects against the selected criterion.
4. Politics: Removing the undue influence of a senior executive or the fact that one process, product, or project’s sponsor is a better writer or speaker (more charisma) than another is not the criteria determining the ranking. The merit of the process, product, or project, as determined by the criteria weights and scoring, should determine a process, product, or project’s ranking.