How Microsoft Project Server calculate Projects priorities

Continuing the series of articles I wrote on Portfolio Analysis within Microsoft Project Server 2013, and following my previous article on How Microsoft Project Server calculate business drivers prioritization, this will (should) help you understanding How Microsoft Project Server calculate projects prioritization.

To highlight this calculation, I will reuse the same business drivers I have defined previously:

• Expand revenue of the Bobby Brown product line
• Increase product awareness among people between 13 and 18
• Increase the number of members of the VIP club
• Introduction of new premium products
• Reduce employee turn over
• Reduction of support call waiting time

And same set of projects:

• Ambush Marketing Reporting System
• Bamsolcare Service Desk Reorganization
• Colthan Metalhead Adventure Mobile Game
• Corporate Tax Returns Process Alignment With SOX
• Europa Workflow Upgrade to v12
• Kern Stinger Operating System
• Mountain Lake Corp Laptop Deployment
• Travelling Up Europe Marketing Campaign

For each project, you have to assess the Project strategic impact; how the project will support your organization strategy, by defining its impact on each business drivers. Portfolio managers have to identify the impact, using one of the 6 impact statements:

• Extreme
• Strong
• Moderate
• Low
• None
• No rating

You can see a summary of the impacts when you do a portfolio analysis and access the Prioritize Projects page.

On my example, here is the mapping of Projects and business drivers with impact statements:

The next step, as we did for business drivers’ prioritization, is to translate each option into a numerical score, using the table below:

The result is the following:

At this stage, we need to retrieve each business driver priority as calculated during the business drivers’ prioritization phase. As a reminder, here is for my example the drivers scoring:

Then for each of the impact statement, you need to multiply the score by the business driver priority. On the table below, each driver is split into 2 columns, the first one contains the impact and the second one is this impact multiplied by the driver priority.

Once done, a sum of scoring is done for each projects and converted into percentage by dividing this by the sum of scores, this is the Project priority.

Let’s check these results in Project Server…

Well, not so bad J