W2_Samuel KALU_Prioritising My Christmas Expenses

In this festive season, I am faced with a difficult challenge. There are so many obligations staring me in the face; all needing my attention. But, as it stands, all these obligations are supposed to be met with just one source of income - my salary.
The situations I am faced with include:
1. My folks are expecting me to come down and spend the holiday with them in the village, and I can’t do that without draining my wallet (I’d have to settle lots of accumulated bills).
2. Taking my family for a weekend at the Obudu Cattle Ranch Resort.
3. Buying of gifts for the family, friends, neighbours and other loved ones
4. Payment of school fees for my dependants early next month
It is my desire to take care of all these issues, but it is not possible for them to be carried out simultaneously because the resources at my disposal are very limited. I am therefore left with no other option than to prioritise them. So, I set out to do just that.
There are many methods of prioritising projects, examples of which are:
• The Priority Environmental Projects for Access (PEPA) identified a set of 35 criteria that are necessary for the prioritisation of projects. These 35 criteria are grouped under 7 headings, namely: Accession, Environmental, Financial, Economic, Technical, Social / Political and Commercial / Institutional.

• Feinstein and Chapel provided a methodology that is based on four factors, i.e., the value of the project, the time period over which the project will provide value, the total net benefit provided by the project within budget and deferred costs resulting from the execution of the project.

• Karl Weigers developed a simple project prioritisation spreadsheet which is based on a set of project drivers, that is, questions whose answers provide a basis for prioritising the project.

An assessment was made of the various issues competing for my attention, based on Karl Weigers’ model as follows (see Table below for results):
1. I put down a set of questions (drivers) that were relevant to the four issues / projects confronting me
2. The questions were weighted depending on how critical I thought they were
3. The answers to the questions were graded to reflect their relevance to the projects. (Grading was from 1 to 5, representing the degree of value that the answer provides, with a score of 5 giving the most of the quantity being evaluated).
4. The project’s scores were summed and ranked. The highest scoring project was given top priority, with the others following in descending order of their scores.



Weight
(%) SCORE
Driver Project A Project B Project C Project D
Is there any opportunity for generating revenue? 25 4 2 2 1
How will the project be appreciated by the target individuals? 15 2 5 4 4
What is the strategic value added to my life? 20 2 4 3 5
For how long will the project provide value? 20 2 3 3 4
Will this project help strengthen bonds in my family? 10 2 4 3 1
How much risk is associated with the venture? 5 5 2 1 1
How will this project's execution affect execution of the others? 5 2 5 4 3
Totals 100 265 340 285 295
Rank 4th 1st 3rd 2nd

Note: Total Score = [Weight (%)]a * [Score]a + [Weight (%)]b * [Score]b +…+ [Weight (%)]n * [Score]n
n = number of drivers

From the result of the prioritisation analysis in the table above, I concluded that if I were to carry out the above four projects, they should be done in this order (starting from the highest to the lowest priority): spend a weekend with my family at the Obudu Cattle Ranch Resort (Project B); pay my dependants’ school fees early next month (Project D); buy gifts for the family, friends, neighbours, etc., (Project C) and spend the holiday with my folks in the village (Project A).

References:
1. Priority Environmental Projects for Access (PEPA), An Introduction to Project Prioritisation and Techniques (PEPA23).
2. Feinstein, C. and Chapel, S., Fundamental Principles of Project Prioritisation, VMN Group LLC and S. Chapel Associates, 2004
3. Karl Weigers , Project Prioritisation Spreadsheet, www.processimpact.com, June 2, 2000