Four Basic Checks to Ensure a Project Is Worthwhile
October 10, 2007 – 7:44 pmI’ve written before on choosing what not do to in your project portfolio. Judging what projects are most important to your business is one of the most vital processes to your company- after all, you have limited resources. Choose wrong, and if your competitors choose right, then you’ve fallen behind.
Fear not, however; here are four simple gut-checks you can make to evaluate if a project is worthwhile. These are not guaranteed to bring you to the most important projects, but they will help you weed out the red herrings.
- What problem does the project solve?
If you can’t name a specific, real, practical business problem either of your own or of your clients that your project solves, then it isn’t valuable. The problem should be quantifiable, have a quality factor involved, and have a real cost involved with not solving the problem. Cars solve the problem of how to travel by land quickly over roads. The internet solves the problem of how to exchange information and data quickly over a global network. A communications portal so that your CIO can communicate information about his recent vacation does not solve a practical problem.
- Does the project simplify doing business?
Quite simply, if your project complicates things, then people will not embrace it. Your staff won’t; your clients won’t. The pros must outweigh the cons, and they must do it in a manner that can easily be discerned by the people involved. If you can communicate your vision in such a way as to make the benefits clear, this works, but the benefits must be there. If it makes daily routine harder, people will naturally work around it. It will not see use. And that means that your project will not bring value. No value, no reason to implement. It’s that simple.
- Is the Resulting Product Going to Be Easy to Use?
The clocks on VCRs all over America blink 12:00 for a good reason. How to program them is not completely obvious and transparent, the feature is not absolutely necessary to gain enjoyment from the VCR, and therefore people don’t use it. Likewise, MP3 players were not really all that new of an idea when the iPod hit. Relatively new, yes, they weren’t the first to market. They were, however, the first to market that was easy to use. Why? iTunes. iTunes made it easy to purchase new music, to load music onto the iPod, and so on. Viola, the MP3 revolution was on. There were lots of sites you could buy music from, just like portable music players; the iPod and iTunes just made it all easy.
If the end results of the project are not easier to use and understand than it is to just keep doing things the old way, adoption will fail. As we said before, if adoption fails, so fails the project. It won’t be used, so it’s not really worth implementing.
- Is It Cost-Effective?
This should be an obvious thing, but too many times it’s not. I have seen project after project done because it is the will of some executive, without the implementors communicating the costs of the project to that executive. I often wonder how many of those projects would have seen the light of day if the costs had been known?
Any project should be evaluated for the cost of implmentation versus the cost savings involved. Not all projects that are worth doing are cost-effective; some things are worth more to your company than money (for example: things that earn customer buy-in, things that bring value and loyalty from your employees, etc.). Still, no project should be conducted unless you have some idea what the cost is of the value that you are gaining.
As I said before, these will not end-all solutions for evaluating projects. If a project does not pass these four basic checks, however, you definitely should do a hard evaluation as to why you are pursuing it.
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