The Great Big Budget Cut: Prioritization

Over the last two weeks we talked about identifying the work that actually needs to be done and how analytics can help guide us to solutions with metrics set to verify.  In a world where we’re having to do less with less prioritization is key.  We’re going to have to say no to requests – sometimes from people that aren’t used to being told no. When someone’s idea is rejected or deprioritized, they tend to feel that they themselves are being rejected or deprioritized.  They take it personally.  This invariably causes problems when you have to work with those folks later.  While none of us can change human nature, an explainable system of prioritization can lessen this emotional tension. 

In business school they teach you to calculate ROI purely in dollars.  Assign a dollar amount to every cost and every benefit and come up with a total.  It’s dispassionate, but also very dubious once you take it outside of the manufacturing world for which the concepts were created.  Take it to healthcare and the questions become downright philosophical. What’s the dollar value of waiting six months?  What’s the dollar value of eroding provider trust?  What’s the dollar value of a human life saved? 

Assigning arbitrary dollar values to things makes comparisons easier, but it can also lead to decisions that go counter to your Mission, Vision, and Values.  You can absolutely make a more objective comparison tool than dollar values – but you do have to decide on your values first.  Are you looking to keep the most people healthy?  Is there a particular sub-set of people you want to keep healthy?  How important is profitability past keeping the lights on?  Are you a faith-based organization with defined values?  What is your role in influencing the social determinants of health for a community? 

Our friends in product management can help us get started once again.  The metrics we rely on absolutely need to be tied our Mission, Vision, and Value.  Whether you’re prioritizing features for a product or products in your portfolio the same concepts apply.  They have visioning exercises to help you really nail down not only what your values are, but what they mean in practice.  Once you know your end goal prioritization is possible. 

One prioritization tool product managers use is the RICE exercise.  In short you give a score to the Reach (number of people impacted), Impact (the magnitude of change), Confidence (how confident you are about the score you gave) and Effort (how much time/money/people will this take).  Multiply Reach, Impact, and Confidence, then divide by Effort (optionally applying some weights) and you have a score. It’s a great exercise to put features of a product in perspective. 

With some tweaking you can incorporate your clear vision into a RICE-like exercise to create a custom prioritization tool for your organization.  Maybe your organization specializes in children, so you add an age relevance component to measure how well an initiative addresses the needs of a specific age group or developmental stage. Maybe you participate in government programs, so a regulatory necessity component needs to be weighted heavily.  Maybe your tech stack only goes so far so you must add a feasibility component.   

The possibilities are limitless, but tying the inputs to your Mission, Vision, and Values gives you the ability to not only prioritize the most impactful efforts, but also take the emotional sting out of saying “no” or “not now” to those very real human beings that you have to continue to live with since the objective criteria goes well beyond arbitrary dollars. 

If you’re interested in making these ideas a reality we can help.  Contact us here and we can get started understanding where you are, where you want to go, and how we can help you specifically.