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A Center for CIO Leadership Summary
As the rise in project demand outstrips budget increases, there is an ever-greater business contention for the limited IT resources available for growth and innovation. As a result, business partners place greater emphasis on IT’s ability to scope, measure, and evaluate project proposals, but IT cannot make the prioritization process work without business partner commitment. As one CIO said, “It’s not hard to design a process to evaluate IT-enabled project proposals. What’s hard is to design and run that process so that key business partners remain involved year in and year out.”
Strike the Right Balance
CIOs must strike the right balance between judgment and process rigor to drive sound decisions and sustain sponsor engagement. Overly subjective and politicized decision making leads to unclear returns, while burdensome process constrains responsiveness, leading to sponsor disengagement. The ideal combination of intuition and analytics results in effective decisions and sustained sponsor engagement.
An Integrated View of Project Value
Use consistent business cases and yardsticks. Using a set of standard criteria with a clearly defined scale rather than open-ended value measures allows sponsors to estimate project value in a comparable, comprehensive fashion.
Measure Risk and Manage IT
Assess the full range of project risks before approval and throughout the project lifecycle, with particular attention to risks related to the clarity of business benefits and sponsor engagement.
Narrow the Proposal Pipeline
To streamline the project prioritization process, CIOs should triage proposals to focus the up-front analysis on the borderline projects by providing simple, clear, and transparent prioritization criteria that consider the business value and urgency of proposed projects.
Separation of Powers
Tier IT governance bodies to focus executive attention on strategic decisions. Tiering sustains executive engagement by only involving senior executives at key points in the portfolio lifecycle. Project oversight should be handled by an entirely separate, lower-level governance body.
Steering the Committee
Executive involvement in IT Steering Committees should be treated as a limited resource. Keep meetings brief and focused on high-impact decisions to conserve executive partner time and engagement.
Related CIO Executive Board Materials
CIO Executive Board members can access related CIO Executive Board materials at the CIO Executive Board website.
About the CIO Executive Board
The CIO Executive Board is a membership of senior executives with a shared commitment to steward enterprise-wide IT initiatives. The membership offers a set of unique services and practical tools designed to assist IT leaders with their most pressing managerial, communications, and decision-making challenges, and serves more than 1,000 CIOs and Heads of IT worldwide.
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