SummaryProject or enhancement proposals are evaluated and ranked by the OIT Project Review Committee . This committee meets monthly to discuss projects and prioritization for the next 3-9 months. For projects exceeding 200 hours of staff time or $12,000 a project ranking process as described below will be initiated. Otherwise, this project prioritization process is not necessary. Additional information will need to be collected, that will help with the project ranking criteria as defined below. Significant, high value projects of enterprise scope are also submitted to the IT Oversight Committee for review and prioritization. How is a project prioritized?Projects considered for the ranking process can come from: - Project or Enhancement proposals
- Projects in progress
- Pending project
For projects exceeding 200 hours of staff time or $12,000 a project ranking process will include the following criteria: - Strategic direction - The project fall in line with the goals of the University.
- Criticality - The overall criticality to campus mission and goals of the activity the IT feature or system supports (i.e., undergraduate/graduate education, research, business process automation and improvement, timeliness or streamlining). Legal requirements or mandates indicate criticality as do potential liabilities due to not being in compliance or a legal action being brought against us if the system is not implemented or maintained.
- Savings/efficiencies/revenue - IT needs that result in cost savings or support existing or new revenue collection activities. The cost of doing a function without an IT solution or without an update to an existing solution, in terms of dollars or staff work hours.
- Impact/visibility - The project is visible or widespread to the campus, benefiting a significant portion of the campus population or, the project fulfills executive management needs.
- User ranking - The project is important to a department and results in significant time savings for the users. If a department submits more than one project, they should also provide a ranking of their projects.
A ranking number is assigned to each category using a scale of 1 to 5. A definition of each level is available at Project Ranking Criteria . Each category is given a weight or percentage representing the importance of that category to the evaluation process. The Project Ranking Tool has been created to facilitate deriving these rankings. All requests are evaluated using the same evaluation rating process.
A sample of the ranking structure used for project "MyProject" might be: Strategic | Weight = .25
Rank (1-5) = 4
Total = 1.0 | Criticality | Weight = .20
Rank (1-5) = 5
Total = 1.0 | Savings/efficiencies/revenue
| Weight = .25
Rank (1-5) = 3
Total = 0.75 | Impact/Visibility | Weight = .20
Rank (1-5) = 4
Total = 0.8 | User Ranking | Weight = .10
Rank (1-5) = 4
Total = 0.4 | Total | - Ranking Total = 3.95
- Project rankings are compared against other projects in order to determine the relative importance of the project.
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Assignment of ResourcesProjects are assigned to OIT staff as resources become available, starting with the highest priority project, but the following are also considered: - OIT considers existing projects, work effort needed for the project, dependencies, and developer skill and availability when assigning resources.
- It is possible for a project further down on the priority list to start before one higher up, if required resources for the higher project are not yet available.
- A campus department may provide funding for a project so that OIT can hire additional programming staff to work on the project.
- OIT Review Committee works to commit resources for larger projects well in advance of project start dates as these resources are harder to schedule.
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