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Use the right metric for project prioritization —different metrics lead to different project priorities.

Prioritizing Projects for Project Portfolio Management Comment It's disconcerting to read web recommendations for how to prioritize projects. The guidance is self-contradictory. Some writers advise you to prioritize projects based on importance, with the more important projects ranked higher. Some writers advise you to prioritize projects by urgency; do the most urgent project first. But if the context is project portfolio management (PPM) and the concern is not having sufficient resources to conduct all potentially desirable projects, neither of these common recommendations is correct. Instead, you should first determine the value of each project (Part 4 and 5 describe how to measure project value). Then, you should prioritize projects by productivity—the ratio of project value to project cost. Insufficient Resources It is common for organizations to propose and then try to do too many projects. Available resources are insufficient to allow all desired projects to be undertaken, and it may not be possible to start important new projects unless some existing projects are placed on hold or terminated. The key, as suggested in Figure 7, is to prioritize projects based on productivity and use the prioritized project portfolio as a guide for making project selection decisions.



Figure 7: A prioritized project portfolio supports project decisionmaking.