Some recommendations don’t lend themselves as well to financial analysis. You may not have the numbers to create an efficient frontier, or maybe your sponsor isn’t as concerned about the finances. In these kinds of situations, you should create a prioritization table.

A prioritization table consists of decision criteria, conclusions, and a cross tab of each criteria and conclusion. Your decision criteria are the key points by which you want to evaluate your decision. Some examples could include cost of project, difficulty to execute, alignment with company values, etc. By assigning a value to each of these criteria based on their importance, you can compare each of your conclusions and come up with a best choice.

How to Create a Prioritization Table

1. Start by brainstorming all the evaluation criteria you want to consider for each conclusion. What sorts of considerations would be important for your sponsor to be aware of before they choose a course of action?
2. Write down your criteria. Assign each of them a value out of 10 so that the sum of all your criteria adds up to 10.
3. List out your alternative conclusions above your criteria in separate columns so that you create a chart. Rate each alternative conclusion by each criteria using a 1-10 scale, with 10 being the most positive and 1 being the most negative for each criteria.
4. Multiply each of the ratings you just created by the value assigned to each criteria. Add these numbers up by conclusion until you have a single sum for each conclusion. This value is the “attractiveness” value for each conclusion. The conclusion with the highest value is the conclusion that should be most attractive to your sponsor based on the criteria you’ve identified.

Example Table

In the example below, a team has identified cost, ease, and visibility as their criteria. They have lots of money so cost is of little concern; visibility, however, is very important to them.

They have three potential campaigns they can run. Campaign #1 is expensive, but is easy to execute and would generate decent visibility. Campaign #2 is just about average on all fronts. Campaign #3 would be cheap, but would take a lot of time to execute and would not be as visible.

After multiplying criteria by conclusions and adding everything up, Campaign #1 has the highest value and should be chosen.