2006_030919 - 3 - Prioritising Technology Investments September 2003 © 2003 Sixhills Consulting Ltd & Author can also be the greatest waste of money if they do not deliver their promised benefits;  Infrastructure – projects to build infrastructure (e.g., e-mail, Management Information systems, etc.) often appear to have relatively poor financial justification. However, they can be significant enablers to an organisation. The financial analysis should therefore be supplemented by a descriptive weighted scorecard technique based on well defined quantitative and qualitative descriptions (e.g., related to achievement of strategic goals or impact on internal business processes). Also, the scorecard can be used as a supplementary selection gate if a large number of attractive projects have already survived the fundamental financial assessment;  Small Projects – Small projects can be too numerous and of sufficiently low value to warrant one of the full-scale methods above. Applicable methods can vary but simple capping of spend with a fixed budget based on suitable business factors can often be appropriate. Clustering of like projects may reveal larger investment streams that are running ‘under the radar’. To prevent this small project budgets should be fixed at a small percentage of the total expenditure and the newly exposed investment streams subjected to the more rigorous techniques above. Approach Technology Investment Prioritisation comprises a four step approach to the optimisation process actionGoTo:3,(Exhibit actionGoTo:3,3). Exhibit 3 - Optimisation Approach Step123SyndicatePrioritise Current and Future InvestmentAssemble Benefit and Risk AssessmentsClassifyProjectsAssemble Project Database4  Step 1 - Assemble Project Database. First, the proposed investments are collated into as complete a list of possible, by polling the key stakeholders and business sponsors throughout the organisation. The initial list so constructed is often quite rough with missing data. The quality and extent of this initial dataset can itself be quite illuminating indicating, amongst other things, the overall level of investment expertise within the organisation. The initial list is then improved by scrubbing and cleaning in follow-up investigations and data gathering. The key deliverable from this stage is a comprehensive database of proposed (even, running) projects  Step 2 - Classify Projects. Second, development spend is classified at the macro level to determine the appropriate prioritisation methods. The objectives of the prioritisation work are set at this stage based on the key business drivers (e.g., to focus on growth, to build key infrastructure, etc.). The necessary tools (e.g., scorecards) are then built from scratch or adapted from existing
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