Prioritize Change Projects in Your Organization

What will have the biggest impact?

Change must be consistent in organizations if they are going to continue to grow, prosper and meet the needs of their consumers. And often, there are many changes that an organization would like to implement. Prioritizing changes ensures that the right change initiatives are launched at the right time to ensure the biggest, most positive impact on the organization and its employees.

How to Select and Prioritize Change Project Ideas

Criteria for selecting and prioritizing change project ideas will be different for each organization. Consider what is essential for your organization. Potential criteria for prioritizing includes:

This is just a small list of potential criteria to prioritize change initiatives in the organization.

In addition to criteria for prioritizing changes, determine a weight for each criteria. You might use a weight of 1 – 10 where 1 = less important and 10 = most important.

Let’s Look at an Example

We have narrowed down a list of potential change initiatives to three projects: Project A, Project B, Project C. To determine the priority of launching the change initiatives, we will use a scale of: 1 – 5 for each item, where 1 = least impactful and 5 = most impactful.

For example, if looking at the criterion of reduction in expenses, 1 = limited reduction and 5 = signification reduction. If looking at the criterion cost to implement, 1 = too costly and 5 = least costly.

And, 1 – 10 for weighting, where 1 = less important and 10 = most important.

Weighting is how important a factor or criteria is to you. If least cost is most important, you would weight that criteria at a 10.

To get the weighted score, you multiply the number in each cell by the number in the weight column. This is shown by the numbers in the parentheses. Then you add each column. If we assume a project must total at least 100 points, the two projects to move forward with are Project A and Project B; with Project A being prioritized over Project B.

Determine what works best for your organization in selecting and prioritizing change project ideas. Be consistent in your approach.  When each change project idea is evaluated against set criteria, the organization is more likely to implement only those change initiatives that will have the most positive impact.

Want to learn more about how to implement positive change? Gina’s newest book, Implementing Positive Organizational Change will be published by J Ross Publishing in February, 2017.