Andy: This is Andy Ray and this is another Tool Time Update brought to you by your friends at PKF Texas and the Entrepreneur’s Playbook. The tool I’m going to talk about today is a tool used to prioritize projects. Most teams don’t deliver the results they intend when they’re working on improvement projects because they try and take on too many things at once so this tool will help you narrow down to those critical few projects that’ll really deliver results. So the way you’d use this tool is draw a four square on apiece of paper, divide it up into four blocks; in the top left block draw the number one, then to the right of it number two and below it 3 and 4. And then on your vertical axis write the word impact; on your horizontal axis write the word difficulty. List all the projects that you could work on, there are more opportunities than you can possibly do. This may come from your “we could _______ if we” statements or it could come from other project ideas; put them on a big piece of paper.

Then start judging those, evaluating them based on their ability to deliver impact to your business and how hard they are to do. The guys that rank number one, those projects that are number one, are the ones you want to shoot for; those are the projects you want to take on, they have a high impact capability and they’re very easy to do or relatively easy compared to your other projects.

Something that would make a project a number one would be that it has a ready, available measurement already in your business; you don’t have to build a way to measure it. Or two, you don’t need a lot of cross functional support; you can handle it within your team. Or three, you can do it with existing resources; you don’t need a lot of new technology or a lot of new equipment to make the improvement happen. So list all your projects, list all the opportunities, rank them one, two, three, four, you’re looking for those number ones; high impact, low difficulty that you can execute probably in a zero to ninety day term kind of time frame. This has been a Tool Time Update brought to you by PKF Texas and the Entrepreneur’s Playbook.