Managing Quality with a Prioritization Matrix

A Prioritization Matrix is a useful technique you can use with your team members or with your users to achieve consensus on an issue. The Matrix ranks issues by particular criteria determined by your organization. Based on the ranking of each issue, you then clearly determine priorities.

While this type of matrix is used effectively within many organizations, it is also a great tool for helping project teams with decision making, such as selecting projects, determining which measurement instrument to use, or how to manage new processes. A Prioritization Matrix can be used in making business decisions and to facilitate teams.

Members of your team, stakeholders, and project managers can utilize the benefits of a matrix when determining the most important issues within your business workflows. A Prioritization Matrix usually is a 4 column table. The first column contains a list of known issues. The 2nd-4th columns contain the criteria for ranking each issue.

Examples of typical criteria:

• Frequency:
  How frequent is the problem? Does it occur often or on rare occasions?
• Importance:
  From the user’s point of view, what are the most important problems? What are the problems that need to be resolved?
• Feasibility:
  How realistic is it that the problem can be resolved? Will it be easy or difficult?

Other criteria may be created to better fit the issues being discussed. For example, for a more quantitative comparison, you could use cost, amount of time, or other numerical indicators as criteria.

Each team member votes 3 times for each criterion, voting 9 times in total. The total number of votes clearly defines how to prioritize issues.

The Prioritization Matrix is a great tool, but can take a lot of time to do manually. ConceptDraw PRO makes creating a Prioritization Matrix easy.