First things first

First things first Last week on the first article I posted for An Entrepreneur Blog, I explained how the Gap Analysis tool, that is frequently used on businesses and especially on technological projects, helps to structure the path between our current state and the desired one, in order to achieve our goals. If you read the article and did what I recommended you must have a list of projects that will help you to achieve your objectives but now the question is: where to start?

The first thing to do in order to know where to start from is to determine a set of criteria that are important to our business (if the projects are for our entrepreneurships), or ourselves (if the projects are to achieve our personal goals). To each criterion you have to assign a weigh value according to its importance, and to clarify what does it means each one of these. On the next table, you can see an example of the criteria that can be used, with the weight assigned to each one. You can see the most important criterion is cost while risk is the less important.

Example of criteria for Project prioritization Table

Example of criteria for Project prioritization Table

Once you have defined the criteria with the ones you are going to prioritize, you must score each project on your list according to these criteria. The scores, which must be between 1 and 5, should mean the same for each criterion. This means that if 5 denote the most convenient stare for a criterion, it should denote the same for the other criterions.

Finally to determine the prioritization of the projects, you just have to determine the final score for each project. To find it you just have to multiply each score by the weight of the criterion and add this numbers. With this you will obtain a number between 1 and 5, and the order of these numbers will give the order in which they should be executed. Remember that it is very important to take into account if 5 means the most convenient state or 1, in your scores because in accordance to this your results would be interpreted. You may use the next table for your own prioritization of projects: Prioritization Table.

Now you are many steps forward in order to achieve your entrepreneurship goals. In this point you don’t only recognize your starting point, finish point and gaps, but also you have projects that have to be executed and guess what: you also know the order in which this has to be done! With time you would see how having a tool to determine this order will help you to achieve more easily your goals.

Image taken from Flickr.com

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