A good evaluation process can help companies detect overlapping project proposals up front, cut off projects with poor business cases earlier, and strengthen alignment between IS and business execs.

Prioritize: Score and Categorize Your Projects

After evaluating projects, most companies will still have more than they can actually fund. The beauty of portfolio management is that ultimately, the prioritization process will allow you to fund the projects that most closely align with your company’s strategic objectives.

Ernie Nielsen, managing director of enterprise project management at Brigham Young University, is a frequent lecturer on portfolio management and a founding director of Stanford University’s Advanced Project Management Program. He instituted an extremely thorough prioritization and scoring methodology at BYU.

Under his plan, projects are placed into portfolios?Nielsen thinks multiple portfolios are a good idea in many companies because they allow like projects to be pooled together. In his case, the IT department uses four: large technology projects (more than $50K), small technology projects (less than $50K), infrastructure technology projects, and one covering executive initiatives. Think of the first three as peer portfolios; the executive one is a slightly different animal. The main job of the executive portfolio management team (each portfolio has its own team) is to distribute funds appropriately to the other three. (There are plenty of other ways to categorize initiatives; see "Powerful Portfolios," Page 58.)

In the case of the large tech portfolio, its management team?made up of project sponsors, function managers (for example, representatives from engineering, financial services and operations, and Nielsen himself) and product portfolio managers (people with long-term project leadership responsibilities in areas such as student services or data management)?vetted projects and came up with a list of 150 for the portfolio team to score. (Nielsen uses Microsoft Project and Pacific Edge’s Project Office to plan and prioritize.)

They then prioritized them using a model that has four key tenets:

• Identify four to seven strategies. BYU’s Office of Information Technology does this yearly (for example, limiting technology risk, increasing the reliability of the infrastructure).
• Decide on one criterion per strategy. For example, the team decided the criterion for limiting technology risk would be whether the technology had been implemented in a comparable organization and the benefits could be translated to BYU easily.
• Weigh the criteria.
• Keep the scoring scale simple. BYU uses a scale of one to five. For the technology risk strategy, five might mean that it has been used in a comparable organization and the benefits could be transferred easily; three could mean it’s hard to do because it would require changing processes; one might mean they haven’t seen it work anywhere else.

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