Make Your Tasks Compete: A Prioritization Matrix How-to Guide
Prioritization is key to project management, from selecting which projects to pursue to deciding which tasks are essential to project success. However, this is often easier said than done, as project managers must consider an overwhelming variety of factors as part of the prioritization process.
In this article, I’ll share a step-by-step guide to creating a prioritization matrix—a management tool that you can use to identify your top priorities across many competing tasks.
What is a Prioritization Matrix?
A prioritization matrix, or priority matrix, is a tool that helps project managers identify high-impact project tasks for completion.
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Prioritization matrices use criteria like importance or urgency to evaluate project tasks, which helps determine which tasks to pursue and in what order.
You can think of a project prioritization matrix like a gymnastics competition: each task competes across several ‘rounds’ of criteria to ultimately determine the ‘winning’ task.
Why is a Prioritization Matrix Useful?
Prioritization matrices are a useful prioritization framework for task selection because you can customize the decision-making criteria to reflect your project needs.
Prioritization matrices are also a good way to visually represent project tasks, as populating tasks in a prioritization matrix can show you how tasks compare with one another. This can especially help with stakeholder management, since you can use the matrix as a tool to facilitate stakeholder discussions and build consensus and buy-in around critical tasks.
Benefits of a Prioritization Matrix
Prioritization matrices offer multiple benefits when it comes to managing projects:
- Promotes objective decision-making: Creates a set of impartial criteria that you can use to make factual decisions about which tasks are worth pursuing
- Aligns the team around shared priorities: Gets everyone on the same page about which tasks should be completed and in what order
- Improves resource allocation: Helps you allocate resources to the tasks you deem most important
- Increases transparency and accountability: Documents which tasks are deemed high priority and why, which can help team members stay accountable to stated goals
- Supports agile and adaptive planning: Offers a customizable framework that you can adjust as organizational and project priorities evolve
When to Use a Prioritization Matrix
A prioritization matrix is a useful tool to help rank which tasks from your to-do list require immediate attention. For example, if you have a list of tasks that require the same set of resources to complete, you can use a prioritization matrix to help you decide how to allocate those resources to what matters most.
Types of Prioritization Matrices
There are many different types of prioritization matrices, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Below are some examples:
1. Eisenhower Matrix
Named for former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, this decision matrix prioritizes tasks based on just two criteria—importance and urgency—to quickly identify your most critical and time-sensitive tasks. This type of prioritization matrix is best suited for smaller, less complex projects, since it lacks the nuance of other decision-making frameworks.
2. Impact-Effort Matrix
An impact-effort matrix prioritizes tasks based on the level of effort required for completion and the expected impact. This type of prioritization matrix can help you identify which high-value, low-effort tasks will most effectively contribute to completing quick wins and meeting project objectives in a shorter amount of time.
3. Weighted Scoring Matrix
This decision matrix prioritizes tasks based on a set of customizable decision criteria that you can weight according to the significance of each factor. In the weighted scoring matrix, you assign a value to each criterion, multiplied by the weighting factor, to generate a score for each task. Tasks that score the highest are prioritized for completion.
4. Value vs. Risk Matrix
Prioritizes tasks based on their expected value upon completion and the risk associated with performing the task. This type of prioritization matrix focuses on your project’s risk profile to minimize potential threats and maximize opportunities.
5. Agile Prioritization Matrix
Visually represents project tasks based on their relative importance, current status, and who is working on what. For example, Kanban boards are a project priority matrix used for task management that are available across various types of task management software.
Priority Levels for Projects
Your prioritization matrix won’t be much use if you fail to clearly define the priority levels involved. Just like in a gymnastics competition, you need to make sure that your judging methodology is understood and that you practice transparency to ensure a fair outcome.
Assign clear criteria to each priority category and clarify the actions associated with each threshold to ensure your stakeholders are aligned on next steps.
Here’s an example:
- High priority: Tasks that are critical to project objectives and organizational goals; complete as soon as possible.
- Medium priority: Tasks that are necessary for project health but are not time-sensitive; add to the backlog and schedule for completion on an appropriate timeline.
- Low priority: Low impact tasks that fail to satisfy project and/or organizational objectives; do not complete.
How to Build a Prioritization Matrix
Let’s walk through a step-by-step guide to build a prioritization matrix:
1. Define the Objective
Before you begin building your matrix, you should align with your stakeholders and team members on the purpose of the exercise. For example, are you prioritizing tasks within a project or tasks across multiple projects or initiatives? What is your desired outcome?
2. Identify Evaluation Criteria
Once you’ve aligned on your goals for the exercise, select the metrics or other criteria that you’ll use to assess each task. Just as gymnasts are ranked according to factors like technical performance, presentation, and stability, you’ll need to decide how to set up the judging criteria to target the most important aspects of the competition and ensure the right task wins.
3. List Items to Prioritize
At this stage, you’ll brainstorm a comprehensive list of the tasks that you want to prioritize. You can think of these tasks as the entrants in a gymnastics competition. Without a full list of competitors, you won’t be able to determine the winning task.
4. Score Each Item
Now that you’ve got the evaluation criteria and the competitors in place, let the competition begin! Assemble your project stakeholders to review each task according to the criteria you specified. Assign a score to each task to facilitate stack ranking. This step is critical for comparing performance across tasks.
5. Apply the Matrix Format
Once you’ve assigned a score to each item in your task list, it can be helpful to plot the scores in a matrix so you can compare performance at a glance.
For example, if you were judging a gymnastics competition, you might create a table that lists each of the evaluation criteria, with the score on the x-axis and the name of the gymnast on the y-axis.
6. Analyze and Decide
Now that you’ve taken the time to rank each of your tasks, you need to analyze the findings and determine what next steps to pursue for your project. In the gymnastics example, you’d compare the scores and award the top prize to the participant with the highest score.
In the project management world, you might decide that the winning task deserves resource prioritization and allocate those resources accordingly.
Prioritization Matrix Example
Below is an example of a prioritization matrix:
To adapt this prioritization matrix for your project, populate the leftmost column with the tasks that you wish to prioritize. List the evaluation criteria along the top row.
Assign a score by criterion for each task (ranging from 1-5, with 5 being the best score). Add up the total score in the rightmost column. The task with the highest score wins.
Best Practices for Making Your Matrix More Effective
As you’re developing your prioritization matrix, there are some best practices that you’ll want to consider. Likewise, there are some pitfalls you’ll want to avoid.
Best Practices
Here are some best practices for developing and using a prioritization matrix:
- Involve the right stakeholders: Assemble a panel of experts to assess each of your project tasks. If you don’t have the right decision makers involved, you may prioritize the wrong tasks or encounter implementation issues because you failed to build consensus.
- Keep your evaluation criteria simple and clear: Keep in mind that you’re comparing relative task performance. Don’t fixate on creating an overly detailed evaluation framework; otherwise, you’ll get bogged down in the analytical details. The goal of the prioritization matrix is to make decisions faster.
- Use a consistent scoring scale: Apply the same scoring scale to the various tasks you’re evaluating. Pro tip: create a formula in Excel or your preferred spreadsheet tool to avoid the risk of mathematical errors.
- Weight your criteria (if necessary): Not all evaluation criteria are created equal. For more complex projects, you may wish to apply weights to your decision criteria to help determine your highest priority tasks.
- Visualize the results: Plotting the results of your prioritization exercise in a quadrant or tabular format may make it easier to compare performance at a glance, particularly if you’re facilitating a discussion with stakeholders that are less familiar with the details of the project.
- Revisit the matrix regularly: A prioritization matrix can be a useful project artifact to prevent scope creep later on. Use the output from the prioritization exercise to remind stakeholders why key decisions were made and keep everyone aligned on task priorities moving forward.
- Link the matrix to action: Use the output from the prioritization exercise to determine next steps for task execution. Avoid a scenario in which you are continually reviewing the prioritization scores without making decisions on which tasks to complete.
- Document the rationale: Once you’ve prioritized tasks based on the outcomes of the exercise, document the decisions you’ve made, including a list of tasks you intend to complete and why you’ve selected those tasks.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Here are some pitfalls to keep in mind:
- Using vague or inconsistent criteria: If you fail to explicitly define your evaluation criteria or are not consistent with how you rank tasks, then your prioritization matrix won’t be accurate. Make sure your stakeholders understand each criterion and how to apply it.
- Including too many criteria: Introducing too many evaluation factors may lead to analysis paralysis. In a perfect world, you’d have all the information needed to make a decision. In reality, you’ll need to figure out a way to streamline the decision making process so you can execute more quickly.
- Failing to involve key stakeholders: Make sure you have the right people involved in the decision-making process. These folks should have knowledge of the tasks you’re reviewing and/or the desired project objectives.
- Not weighting the criteria: You may be able to omit weighting criteria when it comes to simple projects but, for more complex projects, it is good practice to assign high importance to the evaluation criteria you deem most critical.
- Forgetting to account for resource constraints: Prioritization matrices give a view into relative prioritization, but you need to make sure that you also hand out task assignments based on resource capacity and resource availability.
- Ignoring strategic alignment: At least one of your task evaluation criteria should relate to how well that task contributes to your organization’s strategic planning goals. Failing to consider strategic alignment can lead to wasting time on tasks that may seem urgent or important but are ultimately low impact.
- Failing to reassess over time: Priorities change over time. Revisit the prioritization matrix regularly as part of team workload management efforts and adjust it, as needed, to reflect emerging priorities.
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