Hi, this is Mike Negami, Lean Sigma Black Belt.
I received a question from one of my viewers, “How should we select a project?”
Therefore we’ll discuss that today.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below or inquire through econoshift.com.
I’ve talked about this often, when you do something, it’s very important to understand
the current and past situations, beforehand.
The same thing applies before project selection.
The popular SWOT Analysis is the perfect tool for that.
And I made an Excel template for it.
You can download this “SWOT Analysis and Project Selection Matrix” template from
the link in this video’s description.
This template’s special feature is that it has two SWOT tables.
With the first table, you can do an analysis for your entire Group or company.
With the second table, you can do an analysis for your company in the Group, your department
or yourself.
Since our recent business environment is very complicated, with the dual SWOT analysis,
you can understand the current situation well and deeply.
Please start from the first table for better results.
SWOT stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat.
In each quadrant, write your company’s strong points and weak points, which are internal
factors, opportunity points and threat points, which are external factors.
It’s a good idea to do this with your team.
What’s important here is to answer the next four questions: “How can you utilize your
strengths?”
“How can you convert your weaknesses to strengths?”
“How can you convert your opportunities to strengths?” and “How can you convert
your threats to opportunities?”
Your answers will become project ideas and great hints for your project selection.
Let’s do the same analysis toward your department or yourself.
At that time, refer to the first analysis results, then you should find new discoveries.
Scroll down a little more.
There is the Project Selection Matrix.
First, list up project candidates while considering the SWOT Analysis results above and fill out
those names in the blue column.
Next, enter selection criteria in the green row.
Common criteria: “Degree of Impact”, “How low is Cost” and “Degree of Feasibility”
are there, but you can change them and add your company’s specifics.
Then, enter each selection criterion’s weight, 1 to 5, in the pink row.
Lastly, compare all of your project candidates and score 1 to 5 in the yellow cells by each
criterion.
Please also consider the dual SWOT analysis’s results during this session.
By “Degree of Impact”...
“How Low is Cost”, the cheaper one gets the better score.
“Degree of Feasibility”...
Then, weighted total scores will be shown.
The higher the score, the higher priority the project becomes.
Of course, it’s not like you have to select the highest scored project, but since you
can compare objectively with numbers, it’s very helpful for your decision.
Today, I talked about how to frame project ideas and select a project.
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