Value-Based Project Selection & Prioritization

About this webinar

Forty-four “Priority One” projects are not a priority order. Dr James T. Brown challenges leaders who insist everything matters equally. He recalls a NASA group that disliked the priorities revealed by its own Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) judgements and demanded a second vote. The result was much the same. The difficult part was recognising and owning the values those judgements had revealed.

With Stuart Easton and Dan Dures, James explores what makes project prioritisation credible: agreeing what value means, confronting disagreements and choosing which work deserves limited funding and skilled people.

Where the conversation gets interesting

• A NASA team spent a day and a half defining safety. The group had struggled for months to make progress on safety-related priorities. James discovered that people were using the same word but meant different things. Agreeing on the definition was essential before they could make meaningful comparisons.
• An astronaut disagreed with the people trying to protect him. He placed greater weight on preventing spacecraft failure, while others favoured rescuing the crew afterwards. Examining individual AHP judgements exposed a difference that the group result had concealed.
• “Business value first” was not what the numbers said. Stuart describes a European utility whose stated priorities did not match the judgements its leaders actually made. Repeating the assessment produced essentially the same result. The discrepancy forced a question about what the organisation genuinely valued.
• Even spectacular ROI can point the wrong way. In Stuart's hypothetical Rolls-Royce example, a project could save $10 million while damaging product quality. James also challenges the reliability of financial forecasts. Both show why ROI alone cannot define project value.
• A project ranked 24th became the leading value-for-money option. In James's $32 million budget example, accounting for cost changed the comparison dramatically. Stuart then raises a further constraint: what if scarce architects, rather than money, limit what can be done? Usable specialist capacity can change the choice again.

In the Q&A, James is blunt about why some leaders resist AHP: making priorities explicit also makes them accountable. They can no longer avoid the trade-offs behind their choices. That is why he insists that senior decision-makers establish the values themselves, rather than send junior representatives and later challenge the results.