There are many ways for us to evaluate the project we have discussed the monetary evaluation techniques in our books. These business measurements provide us with mechanisms to assess the business viability of the product.

There are also ways to evaluate the project strategy with decision-making tools like Pugh. In an earlier post we demonstrated how this tool can be used to evaluate the design against the objective and product requirements. We reviewed a variety of concepts against success factors. Those design factors had priority levels (weighting) so those design attributes that mattered the most received are weighted accordingly. This same approach works for project strategies as well.

Consider a project objective, and our team has generated 3 different strategies that will meet the objective, but we need to determine which one is the best fit (if there is one). We can set the table up with columns representing the strategies, and the rows project success criterion. We provide an example list of those below:

• project cost
• product development cost
• project risk exposure
• ongoing company support costs
• time to market
• present supply base considerations

Once we have determined the scope and have some idea of the business case we can refine our project objectives and way of achieving through the project strategy. Selecting a project strategy with a low probability of success is not helpful even if the business case is positive.