Project Prioritization: The Ultimate Guide

Project Prioritization Overview

Project Prioritization is the foundation for a successful portfolio. It's how you deliver strategy. It's how you get the most from your resources. It's how you eliminate waste. Roll these factors together, and it's how you can double the ROI of your portfolio.

Done right, it creates a transparent link between strategy, budgets, and capacity, ensuring teams work on what matters most. Done wrong, it wastes up to 20% of total project investment through poor alignment and resource overload.

TransparentChoice’s guide shows you how to:

• Spot broken prioritization - signs like duplicated projects, unclear strategy, and leadership frustration
• Replace politics with Decision Science using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to quantify value and align decisions
• Integrate Demand Management, Risk, and Capacity Planning into one living, data-driven portfolio
• Leverage AI for forecasting and scenario planning to accelerate decision-making and cut bias
• Build a Project Prioritization Charter to hardwire better decisions and long-term strategic discipline

In plain English, prioritization is a process where you work out which projects are the most important so you can focus finite resources on successfully delivering them.

Or put another way:

Project Prioritization = Value + Constraints + Buy-In

We’ll show you how math and psychology can help you understand value, how AI can model constraints, and how collaboration builds buy-in.

But first let’s focus on why to prioritize – the ROI of Project Prioritization.

How Project Prioritization Drives Portfolio ROI

Project prioritization has a measurable impact on portfolio performance. The data speaks for itself - organizations that align strategy, focus resources, and improve project flow see dramatically higher ROI.

Here are six data points that explain how:

1) 20% of projects are pure waste

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), 20% of projects are so badly aligned with business goals they should be stopped — that’s $2 million wasted for every $10 million invested.

📖 Source: PMI – Pulse of the Profession

💡 ROI Impact: Eliminating misaligned projects instantly redirects investment toward high-value, high-impact work.

2) Projects aligned to strategy are 57% more likely to succeed

PMI’s research shows strategically aligned projects deliver far more business value, while misaligned ones consume resources and fail to achieve goals.

📖 Source: PMI – Strategic Alignment Report

💡 ROI Impact: Strategic alignment builds buy-in, accelerates delivery, and increases realized benefits - all key ROI drivers.

3) Organizations that prioritize strategically deliver 40% more value

McKinsey found that companies which dynamically allocate resources based on strategic priorities deliver ~40% more value than those that don’t.

📖 Source: Read our Blog on McKinsey's research

💡 ROI Impact: Prioritization helps fund growth areas while containing spend elsewhere - multiplying long-term portfolio returns.

4) Improving project flow makes projects 10–50% cheaper

Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) has been shown to make portfolios 10–50% cheaper than traditional scheduling.

📖 Source: Mike Hannon, leading Critical Chain expert

💡 ROI Impact: Prioritizing projects by capacity and flow ensures resources move smoothly, accelerating benefits realization.

5) Reducing WIP by 50% cuts lead time by 50%

Research by Wolfram Müller found that cutting Work-in-Progress (WIP) by half delivers 50% shorter project lead times in multi-project environments.

📖 Source: Wolfram Muller – Flow in Multi-Project Management

💡 ROI Impact: Less WIP = fewer bottlenecks, faster benefits, and higher portfolio throughput.

6) Multi-tasking reduces productivity by 40%

The American Psychological Association believes that task switching has a hidden cost, leading to lost time, poorer decision making, less creativity, and more errors.

📖 Source: American Psychological Association (APA)

💡 ROI Impact: By focusing on high value projects you can empower teams to work smarter. That means better work, faster deliverables and fewer delays.

The Bottom Line

Chances are you won’t hit every value lever right away, so pick the most relevant ones and use them as the basis for your Business Case for investing in prioritization.

👉 Watch this in-depth video series to learn more about doubling your portfolio ROI

Organizations that master prioritization double their strategic value with the same resources. It’s not theory - it’s math.

👉 See how the American Planning Association doubled their ROI with TransparentChoice

Fixing prioritization has a massive upside. We’ll be showing you how to build an AHP model below, but first let’s find out how can you tell if this opportunity is relevant to your portfolio as we show you how to diagnose poor prioritization with our top ten pain-points.

Top 10 Project Prioritization Pain Points

If effort and impact no longer line up, your process is signalling distress. We’ve surveyed hundreds of PMOs to produce a Top Ten. If you find yourself nodding read on – we have a solution for you.

10 – Projects keep failing

“Failure” often stems from poor strategic fit, not weak delivery.

Aligned projects succeed far more often, because they get the support needed to see them through to benefits. When you do lessons learned and things have not gone well, the key is to dig deep – don’t stop at “what failed” but go down into “why”. That’s where you’ll find poor prioritization.

"Moreover, around one third of projects were obsolete before they were even finished. With a combined investment of around €20 million, this was a significant problem"

👉 Learn how Energinet saved €6m of waste through prioritization

9 – You can’t list all your projects

If initiatives hide in spreadsheets and slide decks, you’re flying blind. This is often a situation we see with “shadow portfolios” – projects that are not operating via any kind of governance process, but are hoovering up resource and funding, nonetheless. Are they adding value? Could they be reduced in favour of strategic imperatives? Very possibly, but without the data it’s very hard to say.

That’s why visibility is the first win, and without it the PMO will struggle to deliver the goals of the organization.

"There were so many projects going on that nobody knew exactly which projects were currently live."

👉 Learn how a UK charity took control of their project backlog with TransparentChoice

8 – No shared definition of “strategic”

Without common criteria, priorities become subjective, conflicting and ultimately pointless, as everything finds a way to justify its importance.

If leadership are not aligned, you are in trouble. They have a group of Strategic Initiatives. They are priority. There are corporate programs from Group. They’re priority too. Then projects tagged as Mandatory – another priority. Then “key initiatives” each director is incessantly lobbying for. And so on.

Put all these into one unweighted model and you end up with lots of data but no decisions, as leadership have failed to specify the relative importance of these competing priorities.

👉 Learn how a South American manufacturer used prioritization to combine two PMOs after a mega-merger… and delivered results 10x faster

7 – Internal projects always get pushed back

Support teams like IT and Data are often under pressure to support “the business” and focus on “strategic goals”. While that sounds like prioritization, it is not always good prioritization, as it tends to drastically undermine the ability of those teams to keep pace with technology and build longer term efficiency.

The problem is the absence of a mechanism to attribute value to projects whose goals are to address risk and develop enabling capabilities. The solution is a prioritization framework where everything gets measured, even if that measurement is not in short term dollars.

"What I had experienced in the last year or so was that nobody was getting their things done — it was only the things coming through our unit that we saw the value in."

👉 Find out how prioritization helped a North American university build a balanced portfolio.

6 – Departments work in silos

If every team runs their own backlog, prioritization becomes simple, right? They have clear goals, headcount to deploy, domain knowledge with which to plan. For some this might be OK, but for most it’s disaster for 4 reasons:

• Cross-functional work is a nightmare, as teams’ priorities contradict. Prioritizing with an uncontrolled dependency does not work.
• Support functions lack clarity. If you have multiple teams demanding your help which ones get priority in a fair, value-oriented way?
• Everyone is busy, even if they shouldn’t be. Managers keep their teams busy with their priorities. Recognising there is more important work elsewhere is very hard to achieve in their silo, and probably self-defeating politically. Hence you have one team ‘guiding the lily’ while another is dropping the ball with too many projects.
• Process is disjointed. Every team has their own set of meetings, spreadsheet, intake process which make Enterprise visibility or collaboration painful.

👉 Learn how a US Life Sciences Company super-charged their growth with Enterprise level prioritization

5 – Stakeholders keep making U-Turns

The easiest way to prioritize is to guess. Perhaps with a spreadsheet and Post-It notes. Let loose your boss’ bias for action and cut through the red tape with “strong leadership”. But the problem is this creates poor decisions; approvals which ignore blockers, benefits which are ill-defined, bright ideas which don’t really work…

The key question is, how’s that working out for you? If your organization is bigger than tiny it’s likely that it’s not so good. The reality is that alignment takes time, data, patience and structure. Quick decisions made without data or buy-in get reversed.

That’s why “Measure twice, cut once” should be every PMO’s mantra.

👉 Learn how a Canadian Municipality landed Digital Transformation using prioritization.

4 – Everything is PRIORITY 1!!!

If everything’s urgent, nothing truly is.

Real prioritization gives permission to say “no” or at least “not now”. Every client we’ve spoken to has at some point created a spreadsheet with a priority ranking, usually 1-3, to denote importance. It’s logical and well intentioned, but invariably 80% of projects end up in Priority 1, because everyone knows P2 never happens, thus hiding true priorities in amongst all the rest.

"When 60 projects have top priority, you can say there is no priority."

👉 Learn how a European Utilities company saved over €6 million

3 – Pet projects forced in, Zombies refuse to die

Many portfolios contain those projects. The ones that were initiated by the exec who left 6 months ago. Or the one that a director’s thought was a great idea, but nobody wanted to point out that it wasn’t.

There are also well-intentioned plans that go off track as the world changes, and the plan takes shape. Learning to kill these ‘zombies’ is a critical element of prioritization.

The point is that good projects need to command broad support. If you have an amazing idea, then convince your peers: don’t bully a delivery team to work on it without making a business case to justify its value. The PMI tell us that 20% of projects are “waste” and pet projects and zombies are usually to blame.

"We didn’t have an existing capacity within the organization to prioritize all the things we were doing — a lot of operational activities, a lot of ideas for strategic projects, but no real way to assess those or sort through them beyond traditional management structures and silos"

👉 Read about the APA, and how they took control of their portfolio with prioritization

2 – Loudest voice wins

This is the standard mechanism for prioritization in most organizations. It may be augmented by a spreadsheet, but the principle is the same. Exert political force and/or dial up the volume in a meeting to get your project pushed into the front of the queue.

If the person happens to be brilliant this may work, but the chances are they don’t understand what’s just been de-prioritized. That knowledge is with the quiet guy who nobody thought to ask until it was too late.

"It really used to be the loudest voice, the squeaky wheel… or the IT people would just grab the project because it was cool to work on that one... We never really looked at what is most valuable for the business, what aligns with the strategic goals of the business this year."

👉 Learn how a US retailer turned the PMO around using prioritization

1 – “Too many projects” is driving waste

Multi-tasking kills flow. Most PMOs instinctively know this from experience, but it can sound career-endingly negative to just whine about it, so let’s unpack why:

• If individuals are staffed onto multiple projects, they lose time with each switch, having to reacquaint themselves on the job. That’s waste.
• If individuals are on two critical paths they can create bottlenecks, stopping others from doing their work. That’s more waste.
• Morale suffers, as pressure dials up, and people see it’s coming from a failure of management to prioritize. They leave. That’s waste too.

The KPI that needs to be front and centre for a PMO is throughput. How fast am I delivering my projects, achieving benefits? After all, it’s far better to close the 5 most important projects, than to have all 10 projects 30% complete.

"We like to say yes to things… so a lot of resources were promised that may not actually materialize within the time scales."

👉 Learn how the RNLI solved their Too Many Project problem with prioritization

How many did you score? All ten or just a few? Either way if it’s more than zero, then fixing prioritization is an opportunity. But who’s job is it to deliver this change? Let’s explore next, or jump ahead to see why common methodologies are responsible for these pain points.

Who Are the Key Stakeholders in Project Prioritization

Prioritization is a concept that binds together different parts of an organization to act in unison, aligning actions to achieve common goals. This is why it’s tricky to achieve – it cannot be implemented in isolation. However, to start the process of building buy-in, let’s focus on the key players and their “WIIFM” (“What’s in it for me?”).

The initiator is often the PMO, but ultimately it needs to be driven by leadership to realise the full value of connected actions.

Why does the PMO need prioritization?

Prioritization turns the PMO from a reporting hub into a value-creation engine by broadening their remit from delivering the right way to delivering the right outcomes. As such it is a vital service that, done well:

• Aligns delivery with strategy
• Reduces firefighting linked to resource overload and multi-tasking
• Improves on-time, on-budget, on-benefit performance
• Helps the PMO use “business” language not project-speak

For more on PMO Services see our dedicated guide.

👉 Find out why PMOs should love prioritization with renowned PMO Guru, Laura Barnard

Why do Leadership need prioritization?

Prioritization is a vital component of Strategic Planning, and as such a key enabler for realizing leadership goals:

• Enterprise agility – the ability to pivot quickly when priorities shift, and to accelerate innovation when change is needed.
• Clarity – visible, evidence-based trade-offs instead of politics and empire building in middle management.
• Control – through clearly articulating what matters most, leadership is far more likely to get the outcomes they seek.
• Higher ROI – McKinsey shows companies that dynamically reallocate resources to strategic priorities deliver ≈ 40% more value. Boom.

The key challenge is for leadership to accept that disciplined planning delivers better results than telling teams to do everything, now.

👉 Go Deeper on how Prioritization is core to Strategic Planning in our Strategic Planning Ultimate Guide.

Why does the CFO need prioritization?

The CFO is the guardian of financial performance — but in most organizations, the bridge between budgets and strategy is weak.

Money gets allocated through incremental budgeting (“same as last year”), pet projects sneak in, and funding ends up misaligned with the company’s real growth drivers.

Prioritization fixes that.

• Build financial plans bottom up with project level P&Ls
• Bake visibility of risk into the plan to help manage downside outcomes
• Allocate resources based on data: where does it add the greatest value?
• Embed benefits accountability, so projected returns link directly to targets
• Share Stage Gates to avoid double-process red tape for project managers

Finance are probably already experts at prioritization. It’s just a case of broadening their focus beyond the purely financial to recognise that projects have critical “soft” benefits and that approval needs to factor in capacity as well as a financial hurdle rate.

👉 See how a Life Sciences Company used prioritization to drive long term growth as part of their financial planning cycle.

Why do delivery teams need prioritization?

Teams crave focus. Most will happily accept the steer to Project A vs. Project B. However, they will not be happy when they get told Project A and Project B (and C,D,E,F…). They need prioritization to perform at their best:

• Prioritization reduces conflicting demands, protects scarce skills, and creates achievable roadmaps.
• When the “why” behind every project is visible, motivation and performance soar. Put another way, if benefits are clear & well aligned, they are more likely to happen.
• Studies from the American Psychological Association show that we are 40% more productive when we focus vs multi-tasking. Spreading people too thin is a disaster for productivity.

Here’s the truth the C-Suite don’t want to hear. If you say everything is top priority, your delivery people will just use their judgement to prioritize what matters most, at which point your strategy is little more than expensive wallpaper.

👉 Check out our webinar with CIO-Influencer Dr Tony Presna to go learn why every Technology leader needs prioritization

The secret for prioritization: Alignment is everything

When PMO, C-Suite, CFO, and Delivery operate from the same playbook, decisions stop being political and start being powerful. This does not mean group think – slavish compliance to top-down plans is usually a disaster. It’s about dynamic communication that ties leadership’s goals with practical knowledge from subject matter experts. Prioritization is that Golden Thread. The driver to unlocking 2x ROI for your portfolio.

Stop wasting time, resource and energy on internal conflict. High performing organizations understand that they listen when planning, align to deliver, and show discipline when it comes to accepting “no”.

👉 Join the dots like a pro: read our in-depth blog for tips on how a PMO needs to connect Finance, Strategy & Delivery Teams,

It doesn’t matter if you’re a PMO, CFO, CIO, COO, CEO or (another) TLA… fixing prioritization is an organizational challenge. Let’s zoom in on how, next.

Best Practices — and Why Most Methods Fail

Most organizations think they have a prioritization process.

In reality, they have a resource bunfight — endless meetings, overloaded spreadsheets, and PowerPoint decks that give the illusion of structure while decisions still depend on instinct, influence, or inertia.

Sound familiar?

That’s because traditional methods (spreadsheets, MoSCoW scoring, simple voting) look sensible but fail when tested against real-world complexity. Let’s start with our six-point review to find out it your current solution is doing its job.

How to test your prioritization framework

1) Does it build buy-in?

If your scoring model isn’t trusted, people won’t respect “no.” True prioritization depends on shared trust in the data and the process behind it.

2) Does it enable collaboration?

Prioritization is a team sport. You need tools and methods that let PMs, finance, and leadership contribute insight — not just watch from the sidelines.

3) Does it integrate hard and soft benefits?

ROI is only part of the story. A sustainable framework combines quantitative measures (cost, value) with qualitative ones (strategic fit, innovation potential, risk reduction).

4) Is it sustainable and easy to update?

Plans go stale fast. A modern prioritization system must refresh easily as new data or priorities emerge — keeping the portfolio agile.

5) Does it connect with other processes?

Prioritization doesn’t live in isolation. It must link to budgeting, resource allocation, and business case approval so decisions actually turn into delivery.

6) Has it worked so far?

If you still face portfolio overload, project delays, or constant firefighting, it’s a sign your current method isn’t fit for purpose. Start by diagnosing where it’s breaking down.

Google “prioritization models” and you’ll see a host of links to solutions that fail these tests. Let’s take a closer look at the usual suspects to understand why.

Finance models: ROI, NPV, and Payback

These classic financial models are useful for assessing return and cash flow.

They work brilliantly when comparing like-for-like investments — say, two factory upgrades or marketing campaigns.

But for project portfolios, they fall apart:

• They ignore strategic alignment — something can be profitable but irrelevant.
• They undervalue intangibles such as innovation, customer experience, and risk reduction.
• They assume financial forecasts are reliable (they rarely are). In doing so they favour optimistic planning rather than encouraging balanced reviews.

Financial metrics should be part of prioritization. Make them selection criteria alongside less easily quantified metrics for a balanced selection methodology.

👉 To learn more about ROI, check out our ROI Ultimate Guide

Product frameworks (MoSCoW, RICE, WSJF)

Agile prioritization methods are fantastic inside a delivery team — they help rank features in a sprint or backlog.

MoSCoW (Must/Should/Could/Won’t), RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort), and WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) all help balance effort vs. impact.

But when you scale them to an enterprise portfolio, they buckle:

• They oversimplify complex trade-offs into binary or linear scores.
• They don’t connect to strategic goals or cross-functional dependencies.
• They encourage local optimization (“our team’s top priority”) instead of enterprise alignment.

These methods shine at the micro level — but break at the macro level where strategy and politics live. Product people like solving problems – but be careful if they tell you this will work.

It will not.

The “Squeaky Wheel”

If your project list depends on who argues loudest or who controls the budget, congratulations — you’ve got a squeaky wheel.

This method thrives in ambiguity:

• Projects are justified through persuasion, not data.
• Priorities shift when leadership changes.
• The same few people always seem to “win.”
• It’s efficient for career advancement but disastrous for strategy.

Without structured decision-making, you end up optimizing for personalities, not portfolios. Be warned – moving to an effective prioritization model may well meet resistance with your Loudest Voice.

👉 Find out how one client used AHP to deal with her Squeaky Wheel

Prioritization spreadsheet

Every PMO has one. A “magic spreadsheet” full of criteria, weights, and formulas.

The intent is good: create a repeatable, transparent model. But in practice:

• Weights are made up (“let’s call this 30 %”).
• Collaboration is impossible. One owner = one truth.
• Data collection at scale is painful, with version control and access challenges.
• Scope for hidden formula errors is high.

Spreadsheets give an illusion of precision but hide bias and inconsistency. They’re great for a quick review but a risky foundation for a high-value governance process.

👉 Still thinking of sticking to a spreadsheet? Check out our Excel horror stories first

PPM prioritization modules

Many portfolio tools include “prioritization features.”

They’re pretty - dashboards, traffic lights, pie charts - but they usually just automate the same flawed logic as your spreadsheet.

Without a foundation in Decision Science, a PPM module simply scales bias faster. What’s worse is that they also tend to have rigid criteria models, with generic fields offering little flexibility, and therefore achieving no buy-in to the results.

If this sounds painfully familiar do not despair. Next, we’ll share the solution which does work for fixing project prioritization.

Decision Science & AHP: The Proven Approach

Decision Science sits between logic and leadership — giving organizations a structured way to make complex, multi-criteria choices that are transparent, repeatable, and fair.

Instead of pretending decisions are purely numerical, Decision Science organizes human judgment — including bias, intuition, and experience — into data leaders can trust.

In practice, this means:

• Breaking “value” into measurable criteria linked to strategy.
• Getting leaders to agree on relative importance before scoring.
• Turning subjective opinions into consistent, comparable data.
• Making trade-offs visible so decisions are agreed, not negotiated.

Research by Professor Paul Nutt (Ohio State University) found that roughly 50% of strategic decisions fail — but applying structured decision-making can improve success rates to around 80%, a 60% uplift in outcomes.

That’s the power of Decision Science. Next, we’ll explore why we believe Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is the best Decision Science model for prioritization, or jump ahead to learn how to build your own model.

Why we use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is the most widely validated method in Decision Science for project prioritization — and the backbone of TransparentChoice’s approach.

AHP works because it’s:

• Academically proven across many peer-reviewed studies.
• Mathematically robust, ensuring consistent prioritization logic.
• Built to counter human bias and “gut feel” decision traps.
• Designed for collaboration, aligning leaders around shared criteria.
• Excellent for quantifying value, even across intangible benefits.
• Proven in real-world portfolio decisions — from government to enterprise PMOs.

By combining AHP with modern tools and AI-enhanced analytics, organizations can turn messy prioritization debates into clear, confident decisions that deliver measurable ROI.

We will show how this approach delivers for the success where common methodologies fail. Let’s explore that now.

AHP has academic validation

Project prioritization is a multi-criterion, multi-stakeholder challenge — exactly what AHP was designed for.

Research from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) compared leading methods and rated AHP and DEA as the most effective approaches for portfolio selection.

Both are rigorous, but AHP stands out as:

• Collaborative and explainable.
• Scalable across portfolios and departments.
• Proven across industries from government to enterprise.

Want to explore further?

👉 Check the UNSW study on AHP and DEA

👉 …or this Brazilian case study showcasing AHP in software project selection

👉 Why AHP is Brilliant for Prioritization - our deep-dive Blog.

AHP is mathematically robust

AHP turns opinions into data you can trust.

Where spreadsheets rely on subjective weighting, AHP uses structured mathematics to stabilize decisions and surface true priorities.

Here’s how:

• Matrix math converts preferences into a reliable weighted model — no more arbitrary scoring.
• Geometric means merge split opinions to reach balanced outcomes.
• Inconsistency ratios flag when stakeholders contradict themselves (spoiler: they often do).
• Normalization stabilizes outliers, ensuring one extreme view doesn’t skew results.
• Rating scales differentiate projects clearly — no more everything-is-priority-one gridlock.

The result: a mathematically defensible prioritization model you can audit and trust.

AHP counters human bias

Humans are predictably irrational.

Bias and noise — optimism bias, uniqueness bias, overconfidence, random judgment swings — derail prioritization every day.

AHP mitigates this by:

• Structuring decisions collaboratively to average out bias.
• Converting opinions into normalized data, reducing the influence of outliers.
• Creating traceability — everyone sees why a project ranked where it did.

Want to learn more about bias, and how it can destroy the ROI of your portfolio?

👉 Daniel Kahneman – Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

👉 Bent Flyvbjerg – Top 10 Biases in Project Management

AHP is designed for collaboration + decision confidence

Collaboration in large organizations is hard — especially across silos.

AHP makes it easier by building scaffolding for structured teamwork that produces good decisions that people trust:

• Breaks complex portfolio decisions into targeted, solvable parts.
• Gathers input from the right people, at the right stage.
• Removes “anchoring bias” from group meetings — no more loudest voice wins.
• Aggregates opinions automatically to prevent delays and endless debate.
• Builds Decision Confidence that engages others.

The outcome: broad engagement without the chaos, and a platform that forms the basis of decision confidence.

👉 Watch this 7-minute talk on Decision Confidence from Stanford University

AHP quantifies value

Everyone talks about “value,” but few can define it.

AHP transforms value from a vague idea into a quantified, comparable metric (0–100) that combines drivers that you care about, typically (but not always) things like:

• Strategic fit
• ROI
• Risk
• Innovation potential
• Customer or societal impact

This clarity lets you make trade-offs quickly and defend decisions with data — no more 2-hour meetings to argue over which project “feels” more important.

AHP is proven in the real world

AHP has been applied in decision-making for over 40 years — across industries, continents, and sectors.

• Thomas Saaty, AHP’s creator, built it for practical application in real decision environments.
• NASA pioneered early adoption for mission portfolio planning (Dr James Brown explains how in this excellent webinar).
• PMI experts like Ricardo Vargas recommend AHP for objective project evaluation.
• UK Treasury’s Green Book endorses multi-criteria methods like AHP for long-list evaluation.

At TransparentChoice, we’ve seen it work firsthand:

Harbor Foods — From Chaos to Clarity - Used AHP to align projects with strategy; and oil their squeaky wheel.

👉 "The PMO is working for the business, with the business." Learn how AHP made that happen

APA — Driving Accountability and Performance - The American Planning Association embedded AHP into governance, reducing project contention and boosting delivery performance.

👉 Read how the APA doubled their strategic ROI

Energinet — Transparency at Scale - This national energy operator used AHP to manage cross-functional portfolios with full transparency.

👉 Learn how a Danish Utility company cut waste and boosted ROI with AHP

👉 If you want to go deeper into the maths, the psychology or the history of AHP we have written an in-depth guide.

So, we know AHP works…and If you’re ready to learn how it works, then read on.

How to Build an AHP Model for Project Prioritization

A strong AHP model does three things: defines value, quantifies it consistently, and builds buy-in. It’s more work than guessing—but far less work than unpicking the chaos of a model that doesn't work.

To build an AHP model we will take you through our 6-step approach:

• Align Leadership on what “Value” means
• Define Prioritization Criteria
• Weight Criteria with Pairwise comparison
• Score Projects to Build Business Cases
• Estimate Costs & Resource Constraints
• Share Insights that Drive Decisions and Buy-In

👉 Read our AHP Guide to go deeper on how to build an AHP model

1) Align Leadership on what “Value” means

Goal: Shared definition & ownership in place before any project scoring.

• Consult with leadership, and key stakeholders.
• Ask, “What makes a project valuable here?”
• Use strategy docs (KPIs, OKRs, goals). AI is a great help here.
• Treat it as a facilitated workshop, not a form fill: align first on why we do projects, not which projects “win.”

Outcome: a focused, recognizable set of value dimensions everyone buys into, which we will organize into a criteria model next.

2) Define prioritization criteria (tailored, not generic)

Principle: criteria must mirror your strategy and language, but we recommend this list as a place to start, as most models contain a number of them:

• Short-Term Goals: Revenue, savings, service-level improvements.
• Strategic Goals: Vision/OKR alignment, transformation priorities.
• Efficiency Gains: Productivity, elimination of bottlenecks, flow.
• Stakeholder Value: Employee experience, customers, community, ESG.
• Business Risk Reduction: Cyber, compliance, resilience, tech debt.
• Project Delivery Risk: Complexity, dependencies, overrun probability.

💡Tip: Share AHP rules and your internal documentation with AI then use it to iterate your model.

Design notes:

• Models can be small (4-5 criteria) or larger (15 criteria, structured via a hierarchy) depending on the level of precision you require.
• Create local criteria for divisions if needed or have one model for all if you prefer.
• Consider a separate Risk AHP so you can weigh Value and Risk side-by-side.
• Consider a separate “Must-Do” model to score mandatory projects

👉 Download our Free Criteria E-Book if you’re ready to build your own model

3) Weight criteria with Pairwise comparison

Why Pairwise: People judge relative importance more accurately than absolutes.

• This is a team-sport where we want leadership to come together.
• Compare criteria two at a time: which matters more, and by how much?
• AHP math provides consistency checks to surface contradictions early.
• Encourage active listening, and be prepared to change your mind.
• The result is a transparent weights model your execs have co-created.
• Weights should not change very often – perhaps annually so stress that it’s investing time now, to save time later when it comes to signing-off projects.

💡Tip: Pairwise is where alignment happens – so be ready for a good hearty debate. We did this with one client where their CEO told us after:

“We should have done that years ago”

4) Score projects to build Business Cases

Turn this framework into a working prioritization engine.

• Centralize the portfolio: include all proposals & open deliverables (even shadow projects).
• Intake + Stage Gates: Concept → business case → scoring → funding (automate where possible; separate mandatory vs. discretionary).
• Capture finances: Projected revenues, margins and savings, along with a risk rating to differentiate a ‘safe’ dollar from a speculative one.
• Document benefits: Outcomes, owners and milestones. They feed both scoring and delivery, and represent the Golden Thread of project value.
• Capture risks: Both business risk and delivery risk are important. Will be used to both inform selection and plan delivery.
• Score with best practice:
  • Use simple verbal scales (e.g., 0–5 / Low–High) with clear descriptors.
  • Survey subject-matter experts; don’t overload sponsors.
  • Use at least three independent scorers per criterion to reduce noise.
  • Debate where scores diverge; skip areas of agreement to save time.
  • Output:0–100 value score per project that everyone understands.

💡Tip: Collecting data should be more than a task. Use it to build confidence in the decision. This matters: Research from Adam Grant shows that motivated teams deliver more efficiently.

5) Estimate costs & resource constraints

Prioritization is meaningless without constraints that mean we cannot do all the projects.

• People: high-level FTEs by role, plus key SMEs’ time.
• Money: budget ranges and cashflow by period.
• Low on data? Start with t-shirt sizing (S/M/L/XL), templates from look-alike projects or delegate estimating to PMs. Imperfect > Unknown.

Not approving projects until you know roughly how much effort they will take should be a basic portfolio discipline.

After all, would you hire a builder who made no effort to say how much he would be charging you?

6) Share insights that drive decisions (and buy-in)

Report for clarity, not theatre. Here are six views that take the noise out of prioritization and make the data the hero:

• Portfolio KPIs: Total revenues, total cost, total savings
• Portfolio P&L (time-phased): Value/cost by month or year.
• Constraints RAG: Identify bottlenecks that stop you doing all the projects.
• Prioritization Matrix (Value vs Cost): Expose pet projects instantly.
• Efficient Frontier (value-for-money curve): Maximize benefit per $.
• Ranking + Criteria Heatmap: Strategic Alignment deep dive.

Bottom line: AHP turns debate into data, trade-offs into transparent choices, and “my project vs your project” into portfolio ROI.

💡Tip: Data is at its best when it’s telling stories. Why not use the Prioritization Matrix to build a simple segmentation: “Stars” for high value, low cost, “Pets” for high cost, low value, etc.

👉 Read more about data visualization in Project Prioritization

Next, we’ll look more broadly at how to connect your AHP model into your portfolio management processes, such that you can realize the huge value inherent in project prioritization.

Connecting Prioritization to Portfolio Management

Building a well-presented review is half the journey, but it’s important that this insight drives actions, since real transformation means more than ranking:

• Use capacity to optimize and schedule
• Overlay risk to build a balanced portfolio
• Connect to benefits to build value assurance
• Use Demand Management for a sustainable process

Put another way, project prioritization gives you a shared definition of value; portfolio management puts it to work.

👉 Want to go deeper on Portfolio Management? Steve Jenner wrote THE book (imaginatively named, “Managing Portfolios”). Check out his webinar.

Capacity Planning: How to apply constraints

Capacity planning is prioritization’s twin: it ensures resources are applied where they create the most value. Here’s how to do it:

• Overlay resource data on your prioritized portfolio: Once you know which projects matter most, you can select projects based on constraints – the people and money you need to complete projects.
• Identify bottlenecks, stagger start dates: Use data to reveal constraints with a time dimension and predict the teams that will hold up flow. Then act: automate, outsource, cross-train, or re-sequence, building around your scarcest resource.
• Short and fat projects deliver faster value: Instead of dozens of “thin” projects inching forward, create a few “short and fat” ones: fully resourced, focused, and fast. It’s the difference between multitasking and momentum.
• Plan for success with two versions of a Business Cases: “Base Case” with contingency, multitasking, and resource risk, vs capacity-enabled: with the right resources in place to deliver at pace.

👉 See how our Software puts Capacity Planning within reach of any PMO

Bonus methodology: Learn from Theory of Constraints

Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) — a branch of the Theory of Constraints — teaches that projects should be sequenced by constraint, with teams only starting what they are able to commit to working on. And this works. By focusing on flow, not load, organizations can increase throughput by 20–50% without adding headcount.

Risk: How to make smart trade-offs

Risk isn’t just about mitigation - it’s also about informed choice.

When you integrate risk data into prioritization, you empower leadership to consciously decide how much uncertainty they can tolerate. Here are four practical ways to achieve this:

• Define risk as an Enterprise level model: With a common framework you can then compare projects and identify linked projects.
• Quantify benefits risk: A “safe dollar” isn’t equal to a speculative one. Build that distinction into the scoring model.
• Use AHP to weight risk factors: Let the executive team decide: do we value innovation or stability more this cycle? Make trade-offs explicit. There is no right answer, but there is a wrong one – pretending it’s not important.
• Feed risk into portfolio optimization: Build a “balanced” portfolio, not risk-free, but resilient enough not to keep the CEO up at night.

Data-led risk discussions reduce politics. They move conversations from “Who’s brave enough?” to “What’s our collective risk position?”

Benefits Management: The Golden Thread

Benefits aren’t a box to tick after delivery - they are the reason your portfolio exists. Integrating benefits into prioritization means you can track outcomes from concept through realization.

Put simply they are the Golden Thread that connects funding to outcomes, and as such Benefits Management starts with prioritization:

• Link benefits to criteria: Each prioritization factor should directly trace to a measurable business benefit.
• Maintain a Benefits Register: Track expected, realized, and sustained benefits for every project.
• Assign Benefit Owners: Accountability shouldn’t sit with project managers - it belongs to business leaders who can drive change.
• Track benefits at the portfolio level: This turns prioritization data into ROI projections and helps sustain executive support.
• Increase Planning Horizon: Benefits amplify after projects end. Keeping tabs on this period of operationalising is key to quantification, validation and assurance when it comes to value realization.

This is powerful. It’s long established via PMI research that Benefits Management is a valuable discipline for a PMO, but through connecting it directly with prioritization it becomes part of a “Golden Thread” that drives world class portfolio management.

👉 We go deeper into Benefits Management in our Ultimate Guide

Demand Management: How to create a selection funnel

A healthy portfolio does not deliver everything that is suggested. It’s a funnel that filters, shapes, and staggers demand through a series of Stage Gates, for example:

• Gate 1: Capture: Encourage ideas from across the business; innovation thrives on visibility and participation.
• Gate 2: Qualify: Apply a light-touch AHP pre-screen to rule out non-starters, and focus teams on fleshing out strong ideas.
• Gate 3: Prioritize: Use your main AHP model for transparent, evidence-based scoring. Decide where to invest further.
• Gate 4: Sequence: Align with capacity and risk appetite to determine timing by staggering start dates.
• Gate 5: Re-visit: Initial prioritization should not be an indefinite 'Golden Ticket'. Projects need to remain accountable, that costs and benefits remain credible. “Stop” should be a positive capability not a political shaming.
• Gate 6: Review: Prioritization needs a feedback loop. If outcomes fall short understand why. If outcomes are amazing celebrate how. Either way honest iteration helps build long term muscle-memory.

Designing this process is a key part of prioritization as it’s how it integrates into governance. If you lack structure build one. If you have one, use it.

👉 Get our Demand Management solution live in days not weeks. See how now.

Prioritizing projects, then integrating the results into portfolio management best practice is an ambitious undertaking, but is firmly in reach of the even the smallest PMO (or POO, as they are known at the House of PMO) with the right tooling and right leadership support.

It is also the best platform you can put in place to unlock the opportunities presented by Artificial Intelligence, our next topic in this Guide.

The Future of Project Prioritization: AI, Tools, and Transformation

When you connect prioritization, capacity, risk, benefits, and demand, you transform from project admin to strategic value manager, capable of continuously optimizing limited resources for maximum impact.

Put another way, you’re helping your leadership team to steer the organization.

"Priorities change and, if managed successfully, have the capacity to fundamentally change organizations, but only if top management makes tough choices"

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, Harvard Business Review

This is transformation. If it sounds like a lot then approach it iteratively, either one discipline or one portfolio at a time. In essence what you are doing is becoming your own McKinsey, whose best practice is a perfect complement to AHP-led prioritization.

Forecasting made simple

Project Managers often dread forecasting - it feels like a guessing game. But without forecasts, you can’t prioritize.

AI solves this by finding pattern-based benchmarks from past projects. It delivers directional accuracy while reducing optimism bias — one of the biggest causes of portfolio waste.

💡 Tip: This isn’t plug-and-play magic from GPT-5. It needs good data. Invest in clean, structured project data to unlock reliable AI forecasting.

The AI Assistant for the PMO

Every PMO will soon have its own AI assistant — not to replace people, but to free them up. AI can now:

• De-duplicate portfolios and flag overlaps.
• Chase missing updates and fill data gaps.
• Summarize status reports automatically.
• Manage approvals, workflows, and dependencies.
• Answer portfolio questions like “Which projects impact customer experience?”
• Flags risks early & recommends solutions: Project Prioritization in motion

The payoff: Less time collecting data. More time managing relationships, driving change, and influencing outcomes.

This is the quiet productivity revolution inside every modern PMO.

AI-powered scenarios: Smarter, faster “What-Ifs”

Once value, budget, and constraints are defined, AI can simulate thousands of portfolio combinations in seconds.

Using genetic algorithms, it identifies the most efficient trade-offs between impact, cost, and risk. This is core to TransparentChoice’s approach to Capacity Planning, as we leverage technology to solve the age-old “knapsack problem”.

So now, instead of spending days modelling in Excel, PMOs can now explore Plan A, B, C, and D instantly — and focus on the real conversation: Which option best advances our strategy?

And while this is AI-powered, it’s clearly human judgement. The tech provides invaluable support, but it is leadership retain full control.

TransparentChoice software

We have built software that supports Project Prioritization and Portfolio Management. It’s been a ten-year journey to develop the complimentary layers of expertise, but you can now combine all the key steps into one connected solution:

• AHP-based scoring that quantifies value consistently.
• Collaboration at its core to unlock the Wisdom of the Small Crowd.
• Integrated financial planning for bottom-up budgeting.
• Data-capture at scale with no ‘per seat’ throttling.
• AI-enabled Capacity Planning to match value to constraints.
• Reporting and sharing for consensus and transparency.
• Rapid scenario creation, at an Enterprise or Portfolio level.
• PPM integration, so strategy and execution stay aligned.

For decades we’ve accepted that a spreadsheet isn’t the right solution for CRM, accounting or project delivery. Now it’s time to recognise that project prioritization needs that same level of dedication.

👉 See how to deliver Project Prioritization for yourself on our Software Page.

Partner services: Deliver transformation at scale

Achieving Project Prioritization may seem intimidating. The complexity, the speaking truth to power, the workload… That’s why we have developed a bespoke set of Client Services with our partner network:

• Sector-level expertise built advising CIOs, PMOs and CEOs.
• Delivery know-how with successful playbooks for landing change.
• Connected technologies to extend TransparentChoice into full PPM.
• Integrated support packages bundled with TransparentChoice software.
• Time-bound results: 90 days to value, rather than slow roll-out plans.

👉 Find the perfect partner for your prioritization transformation journey, on our tailored Partner Services page.

The Project Prioritization Charter

Hopefully at this point you appreciate the need to prioritize, and the right way to get the job done.

But every PMO knows that without a good structure, new initiatives will not land successfully. The Project Prioritization Charter turns good intent into lasting change by defining why, how, who, and what success looks like.

Without a charter, prioritization can fade as short-term fires get extinguished. With one, it can becomes a sustainable portfolio management capability.

Let’s explore how to develop one.

How to Build a Project Prioritization Charter

Most PMOs have their favoured structure. Here we’ll focus on seven steps that should be core to a successful deployment plan:

1. Purpose: Why now? Link to visible pain (waste, overload, missed strategy) and opportunity (ROI, agility, morale).

   Which of our Top Ten pain-points do you find most relatable? What are the underlying drivers? (Hint: often it’s prioritization…)

2. Objectives: Replace opinion-led governance with data-led decisions; build transparency and alignment.

   Determine how far you need to go – solving Project Prioritization, deeper into Portfolio Management or even into a full-blown Transformation Program?

3. Scope: Because prioritization touches so many processes and stakeholders, it’s easy to have your focus diluted. Start somewhere and build up via quick wins. For example, pick a portfolio or a planning cycle before full roll-out.

   Part of this is building your alliances: which of the critical stakeholders represent your core alliance for getting started?

4. Governance: Assign clear ownership. We see three roles as critical:

   • Executive Sponsor: senior advocate to set the agenda (CFO, COO, CIO)
   • PMO / Transformation Lead: “Cat herder in chief” who runs the project.
   • Analyst: Data champion who won’t let PMs sleep until they submit their data.

5. Deliverables / Milestones: Tangible outcomes vary by use case, but these are key:

   • Prioritization framework and criteria: Understood by managers and cascaded to teams.
   • Governance model: Approach for Demand Management (intake, stage gates, etc.), right-sized, dynamic, automated. Capacity / financial constraints defined.
   • Business case template: Linking benefits, risk, and resource data: the “Golden Thread” of project value.
   • List of high-value projects: Start dates locked in, pushed into delivery with a brief to hit value ASAP. Moved into PM tool if you have one.

6. Success Metrics: Track both performance and behaviour. Start with goals that form your business case for investment. For example:

   • Portfolio waste ↓ 10%: Ideally with a baseline agreed up front.
   • Project duration ↓ 50%: Boost flow, cut project duration. Measure as a KPI.
   • Exec confidence ↑: Via survey or feedback. PMO PR is critical, if annoyingly woolly for a data-loving PMO.
   • Workload stability ↑: Track morale in delivery teams as KPI.

   Use our ROI levers as a guide – which should you target? You don’t need to hit them all to unleash massive growth potential, so pick your goal for a first win.

7. Risks & Mitigations: What might go wrong with this project (and how to deal with it):

   • “We don’t have time.” Spread the workload and minimise model size. Use senior mandate to reinforce that planning saves time overall.
   • “Not another form-fill.” Emphasise that asking for input respects judgement, not bureaucracy.
   • “This feels like overkill.” If the alternative is spreadsheets and workshops, ask “how’s that worked out so far?”
   • “I like people to be 200% busy.” Explain that overloading reduces throughput. Use quick wins to prove it.
   • “How can I forecast before detailed scoping?” Provide assurance (‘we know this is only a high-level estimate’) and examples (‘projects that look like yours’) to help build confidence.

👉 Download our Project Prioritization Charter Pack for more detail.

Six Tips for Your Prioritization Charter

1. Build Buy-In: Your charter is a social contract, not just a document, so co-create it with stakeholders. When people define the rules, they commit to following them. That’s how you turn governance into collaboration.
2. Use the right tools: TransparentChoice is designed to deliver this experience—data science wired into practical portfolio management. Why spend time re-inventing a wheel?
3. Get help: This process requires bandwidth. Either clear space to do it well or bring in support. We have an excellent partner network to support your deployment.
4. Follow this seven-step model: We’ve compressed our Guide into this simple 7-step framework (saves AI the job):
   • Set project goals for prioritization
   • Define your portfolio strategy
   • Align leadership to define “value”
   • Build quality business cases
   • Quantify portfolio level constraints
   • Generate scenarios for review
   • Accelerate key project delivery
5. Think change management. Fixing prioritization is going to feel like “Who Moved my Cheese” to some of your colleagues.
6. Leverage your PMO superpower. Plan it like a project, land it like a pro. Book a Case for Change call and check out our Deployment Plan to prepare.

Want help building your charter? Schedule a free consultation.

👉 Book a free consultation to build your Prioritization Charter

Frequently Asked Questions: Project Prioritization & AHP

What is Project Prioritization?

Project prioritization is the process of deciding which projects to start, continue, pause, or stop, based on their alignment to strategy, value, cost, risk, and resource constraints.

It ensures every project contributes directly to business goals and prevents wasted effort.

👉 Drill into the detail in our Guide.

Why does Project Prioritization matter?

Without prioritization, organizations waste up to 20% of their total project investment on misaligned initiatives. Strong prioritization improves ROI, accelerates delivery, and builds transparency across the portfolio, aligning leadership around shared goals.

👉 Find out how Prioritization can help you double your strategic ROI.

How does AHP improve Project Prioritization?

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) brings structure to complex decisions by combining human judgment with mathematical rigor. It helps teams agree on what “value” means, score projects consistently, and make trade-offs transparently - replacing “gut feel” with data.

👉 Learn why Decision Science is the best tool for Prioritization.

What are common mistakes in Project Prioritization?

Typical pitfalls include:

• Decisions driven by politics or “loudest voice”
• Spreadsheets with unclear criteria
• No alignment between PMO, finance, and leadership
• Ignoring risk, capacity, or benefits in decision models
• Failing to update the plan as priorities shift

Remember prioritization is simultaneously a modelling challenge, an engagement challenge and a governance challenges. Any of these three could be tripping you up.

👉 Check out our Top Ten Pain points to see how your PMO is performing

How can AI support Project Prioritization?

AI speeds up forecasting, scenario testing, and flow optimization.

It can simulate thousands of “what-if” portfolio combinations, detect resource bottlenecks early, and identify risks before they derail delivery — allowing PMOs to focus on strategy, not spreadsheets.

👉 Find out how a good core data model is key to unlocking AI’s potential

What is the Project Prioritization Charter?

The Prioritization Charter defines how decisions are made, who owns them, and how success is measured. It’s the governance framework that keeps prioritization transparent, consistent, and accountable - even as strategy evolves.

👉 Learn how to build your Project Prioritization Charter

What results can organizations expect from effective prioritization?

Organizations that prioritize strategically deliver up to 40% more value and waste 67% less on failed or misaligned projects. They move from firefighting to focus - using data to do fewer things better.

👉 Find out how Prioritization can help you double your strategic ROI

How can the PMO get leadership to support prioritization?

Clearly articulate the pain points, their cause and their effect. Compare this to the levers for driving ROI. Then present a 90-day plan to move the needle. Wrap it into a Prioritization Charter so it’s clear, simple and (critically) very easy for them to say “yes”.

👉 Start with the “WIIFM” for Leadership

Where does this fit in my PMO maturity model?

Good prioritization should be core for any PMO – even a little POO! In a smaller organization there may be less value from tooling, it depends on the number of stakeholders and projects.

👉 What is your WIIFM for Prioritization?

Does TransparentChoice software offer delivery support?

TransparentChoice offers two levels of support to ensure value from our software. Customer Success help with modelling, training and set-up. Our Partner Network support if you want to go deeper with stakeholders and governance.

👉 We have Partner Services on our website, and add new ones regularly

My PMO is struggling – can you help me now?

TransparentChoice software can be up and running in days, and support from our Partner Network can be secured quickly too, so if you have permission to solve the problem internally, we will help you succeed at your pace.

👉 Book a call and let us know the urgency - we'll help

Who is your Partner Network?

We work with sector experts who understand that value is the main role of the PMO. If you’re part of this community, you’ll recognise the names. They offer deep level thought leadership with every Statement of Work. We also work with larger consulting firms if you prefer the assurance of deep corporate experience.

👉 Take a look... we can always schedule a 3-way call

Can I join your Partner Network?

Absolutely, we welcome new consultants who want to drive change with their clients. We have a program for partners, and always like meeting new people who share our commitment to driving value-led change via prioritization.

👉 You'll find the link to book a meeting on our partner page