How to prioritize projects in 2025: best criteria and techniques for effective project prioritization
Most organizations face such a high volume of demand that they end up overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work. Whether it’s digital transformation projects, urgent client requests, or the classic “this can’t wait” internal tasks, teams often find themselves juggling more than they can realistically manage. Without a solid project prioritization process, it becomes nearly impossible to decide what should come first—and what can wait.
And without a clear process to determine what truly deserves attention, chaos takes over. Deadlines get missed, budgets spiral out of control, teams burn out, and leadership is left wondering why none of the truly strategic initiatives seem to move forward.
That’s where project prioritization comes into play. In this article, we’ll walk you through the key criteria, techniques, and tools your PMO needs to prioritize projects across the organization. Because, as you’ll see, this isn’t about who makes the most noise in meetings or which department has the biggest budget. It’s about making smart, data-driven decisions that align with your business strategy.
What is project prioritization?
Project prioritization is a structured process used to evaluate, rank, and select projects based on their value, urgency, feasibility, and alignment with business strategy.
It’s not just about scoring projects from 1 to 10. Project prioritization is the foundation of effective Project Portfolio Management (PPM), allowing organizations to:
- Bridge the gap between strategy and execution.
- Ensure teams are focused on the right projects, at the right time, for the right reasons.
When done well, prioritization helps organizations save millions in budget and thousands of hours in effort. It becomes the backbone of decision-making—helping leaders cut through the noise and focus on what truly drives strategic impact.
PROJECT PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT
Project prioritization starts with the right PPM software
See how Triskell enables transparent, data-driven PPM that supports continuous business growth.
Benefits of project prioritization
A mature prioritization process can completely transform the way your organization delivers value. Here’s what it brings to the table:
- Improved ROI: by investing in initiatives that promise the highest strategic and financial return, you eliminate low-impact projects that drain resources without delivering real value. This frees up capacity to focus your firepower where it counts.
- Better project delivery metrics: when you prioritize based on feasibility and strategic fit, the chances of success go up. Projects are more likely to be delivered on time, on budget, and with the expected results.
- More effective portfolio governance: a good project prioritization process provides consistency and transparency. Forget about random approvals or impromptu prioritization of projects in a PowerPoint presentation. Project prioritization gives decision makers a clear framework, aligns departments, and makes it easier to manage resource conflicts and proactively identify risks.
- Stronger stakeholders buy-in: when prioritization is collaborative and based on clear, agreed-upon criteria, stakeholders trust the outcomes. It reduces internal tensions, aligns teams around common goals, and weeds out “phantom” projects driven by personal agendas.
- Increased team performance: project prioritization brings clarity to teams. When people are clear about where they should focus their efforts and how they can generate value for the business, they perform better.
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER
Get stories like this in your inbox
What happens if you don´t have a project prioritization process in place?
When an organization lacks a structured process to prioritize projects, it’s essentially flying blind.
The issue isn’t just operational inefficiency—it runs deeper than that. Projects stack up, visibility disappears, and teams end up chasing tasks that contribute little (if anything) to long-term business growth.
Here’s a breakdown of the chaos that unfolds when project prioritization is missing—or poorly implemented.
1. Project overload
Without a prioritization framework in place, the default response to every new idea or request is a resounding “YES.” This quickly escalates into having to manage dozens of initiatives, all competing for the same limited resources.
Teams manage this workload as best they can until the issues start: deadlines are missed, quality of deliverables drops, and the teams, in desperation, burn out.
The funny thing is that probably half of these project requests should never go beyond the idea stage. Hence the importance of having a prioritization framework to avoid a situation that is quite common in medium and large companies.
2. Politics override strategy
In the absence of structured decision making, office politics and hallway conversations begin to dictate what gets prioritized. Projects backed by the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) or the loudest stakeholders are the ones that get the green light, even if they lack real strategic value.
Listening to executives and stakeholders is important, no doubt about it. But there’s a difference between listening to them and letting them decide the strategic direction of project portfolios.
When project prioritization depends solely on who is shouting the loudest or who has the most influence, each department will ultimately look out for its own interests. Without a structured evaluation model, it is impossible to compare initiatives objectively. Tensions between teams will be constant, and interdepartmental alignment will be a utopia.
3. Every project Is “Top Priority”
Without a well-defined prioritization process, all projects become urgent and top priority, so teams will always be working in a state of permanent emergency.
The result? Project planning and management becomes reactive rather than proactive. In addition, the ability to manage dependencies, sequence tasks and make realistic delivery commitments is lost.
4. Strategic priorities get ignored
When initiatives aren’t clearly tied to strategic objectives, the project portfolio becomes a chaotic mix of disconnected tasks and ideas. Instead of advancing the organization’s goals, teams waste time chasing the loudest, most visible, or most politically backed efforts.
This strategic misalignment is dangerous. It means resources are being allocated without purpose, and leadership has no way to tell if the business is moving forward.
5. Inefficient resource allocation
It doesn’t matter if you assign the best talent and a large budget to a project. If it has not been prioritized correctly, it is doomed to fail.
Without prioritization, resources end up being diluted among all the initiatives, and the projects that are really important end up slowing down for lack of funding, attention or capacity. You invest a lot of resources but generate little value.
6. No agreement on prioritization criteria
Every department has its own agenda—and its own way of defining what matters. One prioritizes based on potential revenue, another on customer urgency, and another goes with gut instinct… and so it goes.
Without unified criteria, it’s impossible to reach consensus on what should be prioritized. This leads to confusion, distrust in the process, and misalignment at all levels of the organization.
7. Lack of visibility
When there are no prioritization criteria, it is also very common for projects to emerge “in the shadows” and for some departments to launch initiatives on their own. The result? In the end, you lose track of how many projects are in the pipeline, or where resources are being allocated.
And, in such a context, where there is not a centralized intake and project tracking system, it is impossible to manage demand or plan capacity to ensure teams are working on what truly delivers value.
Stop saying Yes to everything
Request a demo of Triskell Software and discover how empowers your teams to focus on what truly matters—based on strategy, resources, and real value.
How not to prioritize projects: 5 outdated methods to avoid
All the issues we’ve discussed so far lead to the same outcome: project and product portfolios spinning out of control, with a high percentage of initiatives failing to deliver. One major contributor? Many organizations are still using outdated prioritization methods that undermine their ability to prioritize objectively.
If your organization is still relying on any of the following techniques, it’s time to seriously rethink your prioritization process.
1. The ROI Model
Return on Investment (ROI) is, logically, one of the most widely used decision-making criteria when prioritizing projects. After all, what organization doesn’t want to maximize financial returns?
But that’s exactly the problem: ROI is a one-dimensional metric. It projects what you might earn relative to what you invest—but tells you nothing about other critical factors in project prioritization, such as:
- Strategic value.
- Risks.
- Dependencies.
- Urgency.
- Customer experience.
- Brand reputation.
Another drawback of relying solely on ROI is that it ignores the time value of money and treats all projects as if they were equal in terms of complexity and risk. For example, a small, low-risk initiative might show an excellent ROI, but its overall impact can’t compare to a large-scale transformation project with long-term benefits.
Bottom line? ROI absolutely has a place at the table—but it shouldn’t be the only voice in the room.
2. The “loudest voice wins” rule
Giving the green light to a project simply because a senior executive demands it—or because a stakeholder keeps pushing it in every meeting—isn’t prioritization. It’s politics.
This approach results in portfolios bloated with pet projects that provide little or no value to the business. It fosters a culture where influence outweighs insight and data-driven decision-making. Business value becomes secondary, and project success starts to depend more on who you know than what you’re solving.
3. Prioritizing projects in spreadsheets
If your organization is still managing and prioritizing projects in Excel, then—let’s be honest—you’ve got a problem. Sure, spreadsheets are convenient and familiar. But while they may look structured, they often hide major issues: subjective scoring, inconsistent criteria, unclear weighting, and no real governance.
They also lack transparency, are highly prone to human error, suffer from versioning chaos, and formula mistakes are common. Worst of all, they don’t scale. If your organization is handling a significant number of projects, spreadsheets become an administrative nightmare and the weak link in your governance chain.
4. “Whatever the CEO or CIO says goes”
When project prioritization is driven solely by someone in the C-suite, the organization becomes bottlenecked. Projects either move forward or get shelved based on that leader’s judgment—or their availability— who is often disconnected from the operational reality.
Other drawbacks of this Top-Down approach to project prioritization include the following:
- It eliminates input from teams on the ground.
- It stifles innovation at the grassroots level.
- It overburdens senior leadership, who should be setting strategic direction—not micromanaging the project pipeline.
5. Budget allocation by department
This one might sound reasonable: give each department a budget and let them decide how to spend it.
While many companies operate in this way, the truth is that this approach can lead to organizational silos in which each department funds initiatives that are not aligned with each other or with the overall business goals.
Cross-functional projects that could truly transform the organization struggle to gain traction under this model. Since no single department “owns” them, they often stall. And without enterprise-level prioritization criteria, there’s no way to objectively compare value across departments. The result? Low-impact initiatives get funded, while high-value strategic projects are left out in the cold.
So, what are the best techniques for project prioritization?
Now that we’ve reviewed all the outdated project prioritization techniques, let’s turn our focus to what actually works.
The following prioritization methods—when implemented correctly—bring structure and transparency to project selection and help ensure teams are working on what truly matters.
1. Scoring model
Let’s start with one of the most versatile and structured tools available. A scoring model is a framework that evaluates projects against a series of weighted criteria such as:
- Strategic alignment.
- ROI.
- Resource demand.
- Project risk.
- Customer impact.
- Regulatory compliance.
Each project receives a score for these factors, and a total weighted score is calculated to allow for a fair comparison across all initiatives.
Benefits of the scoring model:
- Customizable: you can adapt the criteria and weights based on your organization’s strategic goals.
- Transparent: everyone understands how and why projects are prioritized (or not).
- Collaborative: stakeholders can participate in building the evaluation framework, which strengthens engagement and alignment.
2. MoSCoW method
The MoSCoW technique is a prioritization method that classifies projects or requirements into four categories:
- Must-have: essential elements—without them, the project fails.
- Should-have: important, but not critical to success.
- Could-have: nice-to-haves, if time or resources allow.
- Won’t-have (for now): explicitly excluded from the current scope.
MoSCoW is ideal for managing scope—especially in Agile environments—and helps prevent the infamous scope creep. Just be mindful: avoid labeling everything as a “Must.” To keep it effective, set limits (e.g., no more than 50% of projects should fall under “Must”) and clearly define each category.
3. RICE method
RICE is a prioritization framework originally designed for product management but increasingly used in project environments. It helps teams evaluate projects across four dimensions:
- Reach: how many users or customers will be affected?
- Impact: how significant will the effect be?
- Confidence: how certain are we about our estimates?
- Effort: how much time and how many resources are required?
RICE is especially useful when you’re facing a long list of competing ideas but have limited capacity. Just keep in mind: for large-scale projects, it may require adjustments and periodic reevaluation.
4. Priority matrix
Priority matrices (like the Eisenhower Matrix or Value vs. Effort grids) are 2×2 tools that quickly visualize where projects fall based on two key dimensions. For example:
- Value vs. effort: great for spotting Quick Wins and flagging low-return initiatives.
- Urgency vs. importance: helps distinguish between distractions and genuinely strategic efforts.
These matrices are excellent for an initial triage of projects. However, they may not be suitable for complex decision-making, as they don’t account for deeper layers like project dependencies, risk factors, or regulatory requirements.
5. Story mapping
The last prioritization technique we are going to analyze is Story Mapping. Especially useful in Agile environments, Story Mapping is a tool that helps visualize the user journey and organizes features or project components based on flow and priority.
It is collaborative, visual and keeps the focus on continuous value delivery, helping project managers to:
- Defining MVPs (Minimum Viable Products).
- Sequencing deliverables and releases.
- Creating a shared vision across teams.
How to prioritize projects? A 7-step framework
You’ve seen the methods—now it’s time to put them into action. This 7-step framework will help you turn theory into a practical, repeatable process for prioritizing projects across your organization.
1. Define the prioritization criteria for your organization
Before you evaluate any project, you first need to define what matters most to your organization. These are the criteria that will guide how you prioritize projects. Some of the most common ones include:
- Strategic alignment: does this project support your key objectives and initiatives?
- Expected ROI: what kind of financial or non-financial return does it promise?
- Risk level: what are the chances of failure—or success?
- Urgency: are there regulatory deadlines, market windows, or dependencies involved?
- Effort or resource demand: how much will it cost in terms of time, money, and human capital?
- Customer impact: will it improve customer satisfaction, retention, or loyalty?
- Competitive differentiation: does this project help the organization stand out from the competition?
- Sustainability and environmental impact: how does it align with ESG principles?
- Organizational impact: will it drive positive change in how the company operates or adapts to change?
- Technological feasibility: does the organization have the required technology in place?
- Time-to-value: how long before this project starts delivering tangible or intangible benefits?
- Stakeholder support: is there strong backing from executives and key departments?
- Implementation complexity: is the project technically challenging or does it involve significant change management?
- Geographic impact: how many regions, subsidiaries, or business units are affected?
- Innovation level: does it bring something new or disrupt the current way of doing things?
- Enabler potential: will this project unlock or enable other high-value initiatives?
Once you’ve selected your criteria, you’ll need to assign weights—that is, determine how much each one will influence the final score. To do this effectively, involve your stakeholders early in the process. Their input ensures buy-in and strategic alignment across departments.
2. Evaluate projects based on business value
Once your prioritization criteria are set, it’s time to run your projects through that filter. This step involves assessing each proposed or active initiative based on the value it delivers to the organization.
In addition to using the criteria to quantify each project’s value, consider these complementary techniques:
- Use a strategic planning framework like OKR to explicitly connect each project to broader organizational goals.
- Schedule interviews with business leaders and end users to gain firsthand insight into their needs and priorities.
Ready to prioritize smarter?
Stop wasting time on the wrong projects. Request a demo and see how Triskell can help you make data-driven decisions and align your portfolios with real business value.
3. Filter projects by urgency
Business value tells you what’s important. Urgency tells you when it’s important.
Besides evaluating the importance of each project, you also need to assess how time-sensitive it is. This helps you distinguish between high-value strategic priorities and fast-moving, deadline-driven needs—like a project tied to a product launch window.
But beware: placing too much emphasis on urgency can easily lead to reactive decision-making and firefighting. That’s why urgency should be considered only after business value has been assessed. This way, you’re not just reacting to pressure—you’re using urgency as a sequencing tool, not as the driving force behind your strategy.
4. Map dependencies between projects
This is where many PMOs stumble. The truth is that projects rarely exist in isolation. A low-impact initiative might be a critical enabler for a high-impact one. Or multiple projects could be competing for the same limited resources.
Understanding these interdependencies is essential—not just for project prioritization, but also for effective resource management. To map dependencies, you need to rely on a PPM platform such as Triskell equipped with functionalities that allow you to visually track and manage inter-project and task dependencies. For example:
- Gantt charts: allow you to visualize timelines, milestones, and task-to-task or project-to-project dependencies. Particularly helpful for spotting bottlenecks, cascading delays, and planning the critical path.
- Masterplans & Roadmaps: ideal for understanding how projects relate to each other over time and how they align with strategic objectives. These tools help connect initiatives to OKRs or corporate goals, sync key deliverables across multiple projects, and identify long-term strategic dependencies.
- Kanban Boards: while more commonly used in Agile teams, Kanban boards are also useful for visualizing blockers, identifying task-level dependencies across teams, and promoting collaborative, real-time project tracking.
5. Estimate the scope, timeline, and total cost of each project
At this stage, you’ve already assessed value, urgency, and dependencies—so your list of priority candidates should be much clearer. Now it’s time to put real numbers on the table.
You’ll want to estimate:
- Scope: What’s in? What’s out? What would be considered a stretch?
- Timeline: When can the project realistically start, and how long will it take?
- Cost: What’s the required budget, including personnel, tools, infrastructure, and vendors?
This is a make-or-break step in determining project feasibility. A project might look valuable and time-sensitive—until you realize it will take several years and eat up half your annual budget. Then the conversation changes.
To minimize surprises and increase accuracy in your estimates, you can use:
- Analogous estimation (based on historical data from similar projects).
- Three-point estimation (optimistic, pessimistic, most likely).
- Bottom-up estimation (breaking down the project into work packages).
6. Compare your budget against project costs
Alongside the previous step, you need to evaluate the financial feasibility of the projects you’re most likely to prioritize. This means comparing your cost estimates with the actual available budget.
This is where you define your investment envelope for the months or years ahead. A few best practices to guide this process:
- Use funding thresholds to decide which projects get approved or deferred.
- Identify high-value projects that may need to wait for the next budget cycle.
- Run scenario simulations using a PPM tool like Triskell to see how your prioritization decisions would impact portfolio funding.
7. Analyze your team’s capacity
Finally, once you’ve assigned budgets to your approved projects, don’t forget the most critical constraint: people.
You need to assess whether your available workforce can realistically support the delivery of your prioritized projects. Do you have the right people, with the right skills, available at the right time? If not, you risk burnout, delays—or worse—project failure.
With a PPM platform like Triskell, you can:
- Visualize in real-time who is available and when
- Forecast resource demand based on the estimated scope of work
- Identify bottlenecks or skill gaps across teams
- Adjust your portfolio or timelines based on your organization’s actual capacity—not just optimistic planning.
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Prioritize projects with people in mind
See how Triskell helps organizations balance workloads and make capacity-driven prioritization decisions.
Prioritizing projects, programs and portfolios with Triskell
Project prioritization is something that must be approached with special care—especially when you’re managing dozens or even hundreds of initiatives across various teams and departments.
Triskell Software is a PPM platform designed for mid-sized and large organizations to plan strategy and manage their project and product portfolios—all from a single interface.
Here’s how Triskell brings clarity, structure, and control to your project prioritization process:
Align strategy and execution in a single PPM solution
With Triskell, you can define your strategic goals and cascade them across your organization’s portfolios. Using Triskell’s Balanced Scorecards, you can evaluate and rank every initiative based on the criteria that matter most to you—such as ROI, customer impact, risk, or innovation level.
Scenario modeling and simulation
What if your budget gets cut by 20%? What if a key project needs to be delayed by three months With Triskell’s scenario planning tools, you can simulate these types of disruptions—along with many others—in just seconds, without disrupting your ongoing operational plan.
Resource capacity linked to real-time demand
Triskell also connects your prioritization decisions with your real-world resource availability, enabling you to:
- Forecast resource needs based on skillsets, teams, or locations.
- Identify workload overallocations before they become bottlenecks.
- Dynamically allocate resources across projects and portfolios.
Complete visibility across projects and resources
From one centralized platform, you can gain full visibility into:
- What projects are currently in the pipeline.
- Which ones have been approved.
- How each project aligns with your strategic goals.
- The overall health of your budget and resource allocations.
Conclusion: Why project prioritization matters more than ever
Project prioritization is more than a planning tool—it’s the backbone of strategic execution. By systematically evaluating what truly deserves attention, PMOs and project leaders can allocate resources wisely, reduce noise, and deliver real impact.
The right project prioritization framework transforms decision-making from guesswork to strategy, helping teams focus on initiatives that drive growth, innovation, and measurable results.
Ready to prioritize projects smarter?
Stop wasting time on the wrong projects. Request a demo and see how Triskell can help you make data-driven decisions and align your portfolios with real business value.
Related Content
10 ESG metrics and KPIs you must track in your projects
Ensure your projects align with ESG best practices. Track these 10 ESG KPIs to enhance sustainability, governance, and social impact.
Resource Management in Project Management: processes, tools and techniques
Discover the most effective processes, techniques, and tools for Project Resource Management. Learn how to plan, allocate, and optimize resources to boost project success.
New product development (NPD) process: the 8 stages for successful product launches
Discover the complete 8-stage New Product Development process, from idea generation to product launch, for a successful market launch.
FAQ about project prioritization
For more information on project prioritization, what resources can you consult?
For more information on how to prioritize projects and other PPM processes, we are sure you will find these articles useful:
- 20 strategic planning models and tools for medium and large companies in 2025.
- AI for Project Management: tools, use cases and examples of Chat GPT prompts.
- What is Demand Management? The definitive guide for your IT department
- 15 process improvement examples with a PPM solution.
- IT Project Management: The ultimate handbook for leading all types of IT projects.
- 10 PMO dashboard examples for Project and Portfolio Management.
- Resource Management in Project Management: processes, tools and techniques.
- Project Financial Management 101: A Comprehensive Guide for PMOs.
How can we ensure objectivity in the project prioritization process?
Objectivity comes from transparency and criteria-based evaluation. Use scoring models, include cross-functional stakeholders, and automate calculations where possible through PPM tools. This minimizes bias and ensures that decisions are driven by data—not by who shouts loudest.
What’s the difference between project prioritization and project selection?
Project selection is about deciding whether a project should be approved at all. Project prioritization, on the other hand, focuses on ranking approved or proposed projects to determine the order in which they should be executed based on value, urgency, and feasibility.
Can agile teams benefit from formal project prioritization?
Absolutely. Agile doesn’t mean “no prioritization”—it means continuous prioritization. Agile teams often use backlog grooming and sprint planning as micro-prioritization steps, but larger initiatives still need strategic prioritization to ensure teams aren’t sprinting in the wrong direction.
