An ideal approach to project selection is to create and maintain a prioritised list of improvement opportunities. These will likely come from either business objectives as defined by the organisation’s management or business units and their team members.
Common sources of management requested projects are:
- External customer feedback
- Strategic customer goals
- Business change programmes
Common sources of team member requested projects are:
- Internal customer feedback
- Business unit initiatives
- Employee suggestions
Selection
Once you have a list of opportunities you can prioritise them as you see fit but two common approaches are:
- based on the needs of the business.
- Based on the data
The needs of the business require an understanding of the overall business strategy so that projects can be selected based on their ability to help the business reach it’s strategic objectives.
Making project selection based on the data would often mean targeting the things that are happening most often, or resulting in the highest costs to the business. A Pareto analysis is an ideal tool to use for this.