Getting It Done: Project Management in Action

Cost-Benefit Paralysis

Prioritizing projects is straightforward when it comes down to ROI. Here's how to do it objectively when the budget's unclear.

Ibrahim Dani, PMP

At one organization I worked with, we were doing quite well in identifying potential projects, scoping them, and defining how these projects would be completed and what they would accomplish. What we lacked was an objective mechanism to rank these projects—especially when decision-makers were faced with shrewd sponsors pushing projects that might not necessarily warrant approval.

While projects in many companies are prioritized based on a cost-benefit analysis—particularly when there's a lack of a better framework—this approach wasn't practiced at this organization.

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