Most CIOs would concur that there is more project demand for their resources than they have resources and/or time to manage them. Most IT departments have to continually juggle and re-assess projects and their priorities. This means that an IT resource manager must constantly assign and re-assign resources.

Ranking project priority is a difficult chore for many organizations because it requires enough maturity among the business departments and divisions to slow down enough to conduct pre-project launch discussions. Unfortunately, in many IT environments, project prioritization comes down to the loudest department head, or the most influential, based on less than logical decision making.

The first step in the process is to hold a meeting or series of meetings with key decision makers or department heads to determine how projects will be prioritized and weighed. Your organization will need to develop criteria for the following:

  • Categories for the projects or project types;
  • Metrics for scoring the projects; and
  • A scoring system.

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