As businesses grow and adapt to evolving industries, leadership teams manage change projects from every corner of the company. Leaders rely on robust change management strategies to ensure smooth transitions and successful project outcomes.
Even with thorough change management processes in place, determining which projects to greenlight and what order can be challenging for the leaders. From varying urgency to big budget decisions to potential for impact on the company’s bottom line, it’s difficult to know how to start prioritizing projects.
In this article, we will discuss change prioritization, the different factors that influence this process, and standard best practices for using prioritization to streamline and improve transformation processes within your organization.
What Is Change Prioritization?
Change prioritization is the process of scoring and ranking different change management initiatives and efforts to better manage organizational change. It is an essential element of the larger change management process, involving the systematic assessment of all proposed change projects for a given business area or an entire company.
What Factors Influence Change Prioritization?
As businesses grow, they are constantly changing to optimize processes and adapt to external pressures. The factors that influence leaders to prioritize specific changes over others can vary depending on the needs of individual businesses, but certain factors rank highly across the board:
1. Business impact
One of the most crucial factors to consider is the potential impact a given change project has on the organization, whether positive or negative. All change projects have effects intended and some unintended consequences, which are crucial to the decision-making process.
Positive impacts include cost savings, improved operational efficiency, better centralized data, or increased revenue, while impacts such as compliance risks, steep technical requirements, and resistance to change present negative consequences.
2. Urgency and time sensitivity
Another critical consideration is the urgency driving the purpose behind each project. All else being equal, some changes are proposed due to immediate circumstances affecting business operations or in response to abrupt changes within the industry. Examples may include merging companies that need to consolidate tech stacks and business units, or implementing a new technology as an older vendor sunsets a legacy application.
In these cases, more urgent changes must be prioritized more highly than ones that would provide similar benefits no matter when enacted.
3. Resource availability
Another factor that influences all change projects is the availability of resources. Whether it’s funding, technological resources, or employee availability, if an organization does not currently have the resources needed to execute a project successfully, it may not rank as high as one that can be carried out with resources on hand.
4. Alignment with strategic goals
Changes that help an organization meet its overarching goals are often prioritized over others. This ensures that projects across various business areas contribute to a unified vision for the organization. In the long run, this positively affects business outcomes, impacts how customers perceive the company and contributes to organizational success.
5. Risk and feasibility
Change projects with substantial risks typically rank lower than those without. For example, large-scale software implementations and legacy application modernization pose more risks in terms of compliance, data security, and process disruptions, requiring more extensive planning to mitigate them. In higher-risk situations, projects may not be feasible until additional resources or more thorough planning can be dedicated to them.
How to Prioritize Change Projects: 8 Best Practices
Determining which change projects offer the highest value and align best with your organization’s objectives can be daunting and difficult without a strategic approach. Here are eight best practices for systematically prioritizing change projects in the workplace:
1. Identify and document changes
Compile a centralized list of all of the potential change projects. Define each project and include basic details about the scope, teams that will be affected, and the main change goals of each project.
2. Assess impact and urgency
Next, evaluate each project’s potential impacts on relevant business areas and larger organizational goals. Consider positive and negative factors such as cost savings, issue resolution, and team member sentiment. Based on these potential impacts, you can determine each project’s urgency.
3. Evaluate resource requirements and availability
Lay out the requirements of each project in terms of personnel, budget constraints, timeframes, and availability of other resources. These details will help you determine whether your organization is ready to execute each project.
4. Align with strategic goals
For each project, take note of the specific team and organizational goals each project is tied to, as well as metrics that could be used to measure its contribution to those goals. With this information, you can assign higher value to projects aligned with your company’s most critical business objectives.
5. Conduct risk and feasibility analysis
Use data insights and consult your compliance team to assess different risks posed by each project and then determine the impact those risks may have on various aspects of business. At this point, you should have all the information you need to evaluate the feasibility of each change project, given your organization’s current circumstances.
6. Score and rank changes
From here, you can establish a range and assign scores to each factor based on overall importance to your organization. Do this for each project and add up the cumulative score. Use this ranking to prioritize change projects and get an idea of what resources will be necessary to expand based on what’s coming down the pipeline.
7. Review and approve prioritization
If, at this point, the ranking you’ve come up with seems counterintuitive, don’t assume the numbers are set in stone. Return to the values assigned to each factor and determine which ones need to be adjusted. Once you have settled on a list that makes sense within the context of your larger organization, bring it to your leadership team for comments and approval.
8. Create a change roadmap
Once your prioritized list is approved, it’s time to create a detailed roadmap including a timeline for different projects and associated resource allocations. Be sure to build in room for flexibility and establish metrics to track along the way. This will allow you to monitor the impact of each project and adjust priorities as changes are implemented.
The Whatfix digital adoption platform helps teams facilitate change by empowering users to adapt as your organization transforms. The Whatfix DAP enables application owners, IT teams and change leaders a no-code editor to easily create contextual support tools like in-app Flows, Tours, and Task Lists that help end-users learn new software within the workflow.
You can also use Whatfix Mirror to create simulated software environments for your organization’s software for risk-free IT training. With Whatfix Analytics, your team can monitor end-user behavior to adapt learning content and collect feedback for continuous improvement.
Ready to learn more? Request a free demo with us today!
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