Strategic Project Evaluation

Strategic Project Evaluation

Selecting the right initiatives for the right reasons to achieve important business objectives.

One of the most important efforts of every management team involves selecting the right initiatives to achieve important business objectives. Selecting those initiatives must be made on the basis of the comparative value and thoroughly considered opportunity costs among creative alternatives. However, management teams face certain perennial problems fulfilling this critical role, including...

  1. Ambiguous objectives about what needs to be achieved and why;
  2. Lack of creative alternative solutions to achieve those goals;
  3. Failure to consider the effects of uncertainty on possible solution value in a comprehensive way without taxing resources or losing valuable time by analysis paralysis.

We enable you to combine informed intuition, mature reasoning, and advanced analytics within a framework of decision quality best practices to help guide your management teams through the challenges of misaligned objectives, uncertainty, and risk to find creative solutions that maximize the likelihood of success. Our process delivers the following benefits:

  1. Identifies the real reason for evaluating a problem and the correct metrics for comparing competing solution alternatives in a consistent way;
  2. Generates a creative set of solution alternatives so that opportunity costs are thoroughly considered;
  3. Measures and quantifies the uncertainties and risks associated with each alternative so that trade-offs are easily understood and hybrid solutions can be developed that take advantage of the best elements of the best alternatives;
  4. Produces an auditable and easy to understand description of the rationale for a selected course of action.

In his seminal work, Why Decisions Fail, Paul C. Nutt describes four contrasting project risk management practices that are present among the most successful project executions and debacles, and reports their success rate by proportion used:

Framing (used 37% of the time)69%
versus
Idea Justification (used 63%)47%

Creative Synthesis of Options (used 13%)86%
versus
Single Option (used 28%)50%
Analysis/Bargaining (used 52%)70%
versus
Subjective/Judgment (used 48%)51%

Collaborative Participation (used 25%)95%
versus
Edict or Persuasion (used 76%)54%

 

How We Work With You

To help you get started, we offer our Strategic Project Evaluation in two phases: Rapid Framing and Evaluation to Agreement. These phases are designed to incorporate the benefits of framing, creative synthesis, quantitative analysis, and multidisciplinary collaboration. Each phase is priced separately.

Rapid Framing provides the qualitative characterization of a project opportunity. We help to...

  1. Clarify the real reason for declaring the opportunity worth evaluating by identifying the right strategic question;
  2. Identify the strategic decisions that need to be considered now versus those that are foregone or can be deferred;
  3. Craft three to seven creative decision strategies with their rationales;
  4. Construct an influence diagram for mapping the relevance of critical uncertainties and strategic decisions on project success.
This phase usually takes two to three weeks and culminates in a two-day workshop that puts the framing in a concise verbal and graphical display for quick and effective communication to other stakeholders. Framing sets the stage for quantitative evaluation.

In Evaluation to Agreement, we convert the qualitative framing into a quantified decision and risk analysis model. With this model, you will understand...

  1. The full risk profile for each decision strategy;
  2. Potential risk factors that can cause decision regret;
  3. Value of information analysis to budget further research into the risk factors to clarify the best path forward;
  4. Recommendations for strategic optimization based on value of control;
  5. Other important insights into possible tradeoffs.
The project discovery, framing, and analysis is composed into a decision support package used to achieve commitment to action with your decision review board.

If you want to ensure that you effectively implement the project risk management characteristics most strongly correlating to success, you know what to do...


incite! decision technologies, llc

Atlanta, GA, USA

+1 678 947 5997 (US) | [email protected]

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