Automate Your Project Prioritisation
April 3rd, 2007
I’ve been playing today by creating a little application. In this software, I can enter the names of all my projects – either ideas I’ve started work on but not launched, or those ideas that I might work on next (ie, fully-fledged ideas that I think are a viable product or service to provide).
I then rate each of those products according to a handful of factors, on a totally arbritarily and subjective scale of 0 to 5:
Short-term Income – how much income this will produce at launch as compared to over the long-term
Long-term Income – how much income this will produce over the long-term as compared to at launch
Development Effort – how much effort this will take to get to a point where I’m happy to start accepting customers (either in terms of personal time spent, or money spent on outsourcing work)
Support Effort – how much effort this will take once I’ve got customers on board (either in terms of personal time spent, or money spent on outsourcing work)
Marketing Effort – how much effort will be spent on promoting it once it’s live
List Building – how much this will impact my list building (remember, some projects might build a list but have 0 direct income over the short-term and long-term… but maybe the next projet will then use that list to build income).
Customer Service – how important this project is to my existing customers (eg, if I’ve promised them upgrades).
I can then weight each of these factors:
Customer Service is most important, so I give it a weighting of 20. Then each project gains a bonus of 0 to 100 to it’s “total score”, depending on how I rate it on the 0 to 5 scale.
Short-Term Income is then the next most important, so I give that a weighting of 5. So each project then gains total points of 0 to 25. So a project with a customer service rating of 2 will be outweighed by another project with a Short-Term Income rating of 5, but only just.
And so on.
I can weight each factor with a negative number, so Support Effort gets a whacking -10. Big enough to make support-intensive projects move way down the list of projects when ranked by their total score, but not big enough to outweigh the customer service impact. So project with a customer service impact of +100 will at most have a -50 impact due to very intense support.
And that’s it, other than the software then showing your next project on the front page.
Why did I do this? I hope around from project to project, simply because today, “innovation” is important to me, so I do something that pushes my skillset, but tomorrow, “short term income” is important, so I drop that project and work on something else.
Over time, as I fine-tune the weighting and scoring, I’ll get a very clear idea of which project is most important to me according to my fundamental values, not according to the whims of how I feel that day.
I’ll also be adding the facility shortly to add other weighting factors without resorting to re-coding the software, which will then make it a much more viable software to sell.
Is this software available?
Not for sale, but if you want a review copy, simply post a trackback on your blog to this site (http://www.automateyourbusiness.com), and I’ll pick up on it and send you a full copy for you to play with.
