My first model - A Project for “Project Management & Collaboration” Elective

One of our deliverables for our “Project Management & Collaboration” elective was a project for Emory Health Care’s Strategic Planning Office. The project was to interview the team, and identify inefficient processes in their project management tasks and assist them in rectifying these issues. Our discussions with the team had led us to identify one of the problems that was “Constantly shifting priorities based on stakeholder positions lead to lack of consistency in project prioritization.”
We believed that the Strategic Planning Office needed our help in the area of project prioritization. Currently the SPO is managing 41 major projects that are scheduled for the next five months. These projects span across 3 different organizations. It was imperative for SPO to effectively effectively prioritize work efforts in order to finish key projects on time.
We noticed that project priorities were re-shuffled frequently , due to politics or system requirements. These reshuffles were made without evaluating how it would impact the project portfolio etc. We determined that a way to help the Strategic Management Office overcome this issue would be to develop a simple model that could quantitatively evaluate projects on multiple variables and generate a project prioritization ranking for each project in the portfolio.
With this in mind we created a model that allows users to prioritize projects based on attributes such as ROI, Alignment with Strategic Objective etc. For each attribute, users enter a number between 0 and 100, representing the variable’s utility. It is possible for some attributes, at a higher or a lower value, to have a diminishing marginal utility. Using utility instead of the actual value for a variable such as ROI will accommodate this diminishing marginal utility. Below is a screenshot of our model template. The model then applies a defined weighting to each attribute to calculate the overall score for each project, and then ranks the projects.