Project management requires a certain amount of expertise to prioritize the importance of each project (especially in the budget phase). But PPM professionals have developed tools and methods to help you. Let's take a look at the SIP approach. What does it enable you to do?
Prioritizing project proposals in the budget phase is a classic. Each entity presents the projects it wishes to implement to the organization responsible for carrying them out. The latter compares the total number of requests against the available budget, and generally finds that "it's not going to happen". You can't do everything, and you have to choose which projects to implement.
But how do you choose projects? How do you get applicants to accept this choice? That's what the project prioritization phase is all about.
To this end, we have developed a structured methodological approach that has proved its worth. We call it SIP for " Strategy - Importance - Weight ".
The SIP process is divided into 3 stages:
The collection and evaluation phase consists of identifying project intentions, describing them and qualifying each one according to 3 axes:
Intentions are described using Ad Hoc sheets. These various assessments are used to produce an initial bubble diagram representing :
At the same time, the project descriptions enable us to carry out an initial "load/capacity" analysis.
It consists in bringing together project managers using the same resources to validate the assessment previously carried out. This pooling is a meeting facilitated by an external player (consultant, PMO, etc.).
Once this has been achieved, the organization has a clear, shared vision of the projects to be carried out, and their priorities.
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The last phase is management. It consists of choosing the projects that will be carried out, based on the previous considerations.
Projects are selected in the following order:
Once this selection has been made, detailed scenario planning is essential to validate the feasibility of the chosen scenario.
The SIP approach offers a participative and structured way of facilitating the prioritization process.
This action prioritization matrix facilitates decision-making and helps operational staff (e.g. senior management) to understand these decisions.