Certain safety and compliance requests were urgent and needed attention immediately, but other compliance requests were less urgent and could be out into a general work queue. In one engineering organization, various safety requests, regulatory compliance requests, and other improvement requests would come to the different engineering teams. This is where the simplicity of the priority matrix shines. Again, we would never suggest applying a project scoring model to operational work, but there needs to be a way to prioritize operational work from project work. However, some operational work may still require a lot of resource effort and may in fact be more important than some project work. This happens by having clear definitions of a project so that the organization can distinguish between project and operational work. In this case, it is imperative to distinguish true project work from operational work. Where there is a high volume of project and operational requestsĪ related scenario occurs when there is a high volume of both project requests and operational requests. If no prioritization is done in this environment, work intake simply becomes a matter of starting projects on a first-in/first-out basis, which violates the principles of portfolio management. In this case, scoring would be an over-kill the organization needed a way to focus on the most important work at that time. I have seen this approach used in organizations that received a high volume of different sized project requests.
A prioritization matrix can be used to triage large volumes of project requests to focus the organization on the most important and urgent projects. In environments where there is a high volume of project requests, it may not be practical to apply a scoring model to each request in order to prioritize the work. There are a few primary use cases for a priority matrix, which we will cover below: High volume of project intake requests When Should a Prioritization Matrix Be Used? The Eisenhower matrix does not support this.Ĭlick here for a copy of these slides and a blank prioritization matrix template. The priority matrix enables multiple categories of work to be prioritized so that a fair comparison can be made between types of work. The Eisenhower matrix resembles the priority matrix above, but the application of the priority matrix is on project work and operational work that commonly impacts more than one person. It is designed to help people prioritize tasks in order to focus on tasks that are most important and eliminate tasks that do not add value. The Eisenhower matrix is a 2×2 matrix that also applies urgency and importance. The priority matrix we are talking about is a little different than what is referred to as an Eisenhower Matrix, which is focused on task management. Priority Matrix Example The Eisenhower Matrix Versus the Priority Matrix
prioritization based on the category of work) and when there are more categories of work, greater segmentation is useful. Remember – a priority matrix is categorical prioritization (i.e. This is valuable when organizations need a wider range of options for categorizing projects. If no prioritization is done in an environment with a high volume of work requests, work intake simply becomes a matter of starting projects on a first-in/first-out basis, which violates the principles of portfolio management In this way, we can further segment priorities across each impact level. We can add an urgency dimension to the priority matrix by using three columns in the matrix below (each column representing a different level of urgency). In the example below, we expand this much further to provide a greater range of priority categories within the must do/need to do/should do/could do paradigm (each row representing a different level of impact). The most simplistic prioritization matrix has three choices, the classic low/medium/high, but some organizations may utilize “must do”, “need to do”, “should do”, and “could do” priority assignments. A priority matrix is easy to understand and simple to use because calculations are not required. It has three primary strengths: simplicity, speed, and applicability to all types of work (projects and operational work). What is a Priority Matrix?Ī priority matrix is a tool used to categorically prioritize types of work.
#Itil priority matrix how to#
In this post we will cover what a priority matrix is and how to use a prioritization matrix in the context of project portfolio management.
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