Project Management: Foundations to Practice · Project Initiation and the Business Case
Selecting and Prioritizing Projects
Most organizations have more good ideas than capacity to execute them. This chapter covers the disciplines used to choose, and why a technically excellent proposal can still be the wrong choice.
A common approach to project selection is weighted scoring, where candidate projects are rated against criteria like strategic alignment, expected return, and risk, and then ranked by total score. This forces an explicit, comparable evaluation across otherwise very different types of proposals, converting a subjective debate into a structured comparison, though the weighting of criteria itself remains a judgment call that shapes which projects the model favors.
Key Takeaways
- Weighted scoring models rate candidate projects against criteria like strategic alignment, expected return, and risk to enable comparison.
- Portfolio balancing deliberately spreads investment across short-term and long-term initiatives rather than selecting purely by individual score.
- The Holistic View principle means a technically excellent project can still be the wrong choice if it doesn't fit organizational strategy.
- Sunk cost bias and easily gamed selection criteria are common pitfalls that undermine genuine, objective project selection.