Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to choose between competing projects?
You could do A, B, or C – but find it difficult to prioritise and choose which one would give you the greatest return on any time, money and energy you expend on it?
You could be a single person business or part of a larger organisation, where you’re competing for resources and need to prove the project is “worthy” and “viable”.
Either way you need a mechanism to choose and prioritise projects. Barbara and I have designed a process which will help get all the facts out into the open so you can make informed decisions.
While the article covers the basics, you can download a 25 minute talk which goes into the process in more depth with a live example of how Rotary (which runs as a major business) could use the process.
Alternatively RIGHT CLICK and SELECT "Save As" to download the talk
I’m going to start with an acrostic – DICTATE which encapsulates the whole process.
So what do the letters stand for?
D – Details (Write down your answers)
What is it you’re trying to accomplish? What problem is this going to solve?
Questions you can ask (yourself or someone coming to you with a proposal) include…
“Tell me a little bit about what’s going on with
“Interesting… can you tell me more about that.”
“Summarise for me the current impact of this problem.”
“Why do you want to get involved?”
I – Impact
Why is it important to solve this issue? What’s the positive impact going to be if it’s solved. The impact could be on you, your business, other individuals or a whole community.
What’s the impact of not solving it? Are things going to get worse? Or is the status quo just going to be maintained? How bad is the issue anyway?
C – Contribution / Cost
No one has infinite time, money, resources or energy. And we all have competing activities vying for our attention.
So what resources, money, time, people would need to be allocated to solving this issue?
Be specific!
T – Timeline
What’s the time frame for this project? Is it a one off project? An ongoing project and if so, how long for?
What’s the time commitment required from everyone involved? What impact does this have on the people involved in carrying this out?
A –Actions / Activities
What are the action steps you’ll need to put into place? When? By whom?
T – Talking – Communication - Getting the message out
Assuming this is a project that you want to publicise, how will you go about this? Is it newsworthy? Who else can help get the message out? Radio, TV, Newspapers etc.
If the project is concerned with marketing a product, how will you go about doing this? Include costs for getting the word out here.
E – Engagement – Emotional Buy in
Human beings are a skin-bag of emotions!
So no matter how good the rational reasons for engaging in a project are, it’s critical that you have emotional buy-in for the project from everyone concerned.
If you don’t, you’ll find that people will drag the chain, disappear or maybe even actively sabotage!
So if there’s the slightest doubt – factor it in.
By the way, this is true even if it’s just you involved in the project. You may rationally know you need to take a certain course of action, but if your heart isn’t in it – you won’t do it. Oh, you may make an attempt – but somewhere along the line, you’ll sabotage it.
Next Steps:
Once you have all this down on paper, I suggest you use what I call the “Head, Heart and Gut” process.
On a scale of 1 to 5 make sure that you Head, Heart and Gut will all give it at least a 3 out of 5. If not, walk away!
Complimentary Download
You can download a Template of the DICTATE process here.
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