Case study
Templatisation
Information technology industry
Situation analysis
A team at an IT start-up was tasked with accepting or rejecting incoming projects based on several rating criteria. This presented some issues:
- Desirable projects could be rejected since the selection process was subjective and not all projects were assessed according to the same criteria
- Calculating the project ratings was complex and difficult for the team
- No records were kept about how projects had fared in the selection process
- No knowledge of where rejected projects fell short
- Process was not well-defined and could not be improved based on results
Solution
- Our solution was to build the selection process into an MS Excel template
- We worked with the client to understand the evaluation process and the weightings of each criterion
- We recorded these in the tool and set up the criteria and weightings to be editable in the event of change, though the logic used to aggregate the ratings is protected from edits
- The tool performs rating calculations and assigns a recommendation to each project by score – Accept, Consider Accepting, or Reject
- When a project is evaluated, the project inputs with score and recommendation are added to the table of records for future reference and comparison
- Reporting tab shows statistics of the answers to each selection question
- Can be filtered by project recommendation allowing the team to see which criteria are pivotal in the fate of a project
reliable results
data-driven decisions
easy to tweak process
Outcomes
The results of implementing our solution were as follows:
- The selection process became an easy to use set of questions and answer inputs
- Calculations are handled in the background and return a score with a recommendation on an objective, consistent basis
- All rated projects are recorded and stored in the tool for easy reference
- Statistics regarding the answers to each question are readily available
- Easy to spot if certain questions/weightings are causing otherwise desirable projects to be rejected or vice versa
- Selection process can be improved based on this evidence
- Selection criteria and question weightings are easy to update as required
- Emotion, subjectivity, and guesswork are removed from the selection process
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