What do you do if you need to prioritize strategic initiatives as an industrial engineer?

1 Identify your criteria

Before you can rank your initiatives, you need to define the criteria that will guide your decision. These criteria should reflect your organization's vision, mission, values, and objectives, as well as the available resources, constraints, and risks. When considering criteria, it is important to think about the impact the initiative will have on customers, stakeholders, and processes. Additionally, consider the urgency of the initiative and the consequences of delaying or not doing it. The difficulty of the initiative should also be taken into account - what skills and resources are required to execute it? Lastly, assess how well the initiative fits with your current strategy, culture, and priorities.

3 Rank your initiatives

After scoring your initiatives, you can rank them from highest to lowest based on their total score. This will give you a clear understanding of which initiatives are most important, which ones are desirable but not necessary, and which ones are low-priority or irrelevant. Additionally, you can group your initiatives into categories such as must-do, should-do, and could-do. Must-do initiatives should be your top priority and receive the most resources and attention as they have a high impact, urgency, and alignment with low or moderate difficulty. Should-do initiatives should be your secondary priority and receive some resources and attention, but not at the expense of must-do initiatives as they have a moderate impact, urgency, and alignment with moderate or high difficulty. Finally, could-do initiatives should be your lowest priority and receive minimal resources and attention if you have spare capacity and time as they have a low impact, urgency, and alignment with low or high difficulty.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?