When everything is urgent, nothing is. Prioritization stops being a technical exercise and becomes a permanent negotiation. The way out is not a complex scoring model, but a few agreed criteria applied with discipline.
Four criteria are enough
- Strategic alignment: which business objective does it contribute to, and how much?
- Value and urgency: what is lost if it is postponed by a quarter?
- Effort and capacity: which critical resources does it use, and are they available?
- Risk: how uncertain is delivery, and what happens if it fails?
How to use them in committee
Assess every initiative with the same criteria, in the same session, and rank them. Then draw the capacity line: what is above it gets executed, what is below it waits. The conversation shifts from “why isn’t my project moving?” to “what do we take out so mine can go in?”.
Common mistakes
Weighting too many criteria, recalculating scores every week or allowing exceptions at no cost. A simple system that is respected is worth more than a sophisticated one that nobody applies.