Enterprise Mobility Project Prioritization Best Practices

With many business scrambling to get a piece of the mobile pie (web 3.0), multiple mobile projects are thrown at managers. How can a manager properly prioritize these projects, forecast the ROI, and build a strategic mobility road-map? Given my experiences in industry I can truly say there is no one-size-fits-all approach, but by adopting the following framework mobile projects can be prioritized to optimize the finite resources of a business.

First think of Risk vs. Reward. The more risky a projects success, obviously the more reward (revenue, reach, profit, savings) a project must have. While it is difficult to measure this apples to apples, think of creating a weighted average in the form of a rubric.

Now you need to think about your cost of capital: ie. How much does it cost you to fund the mobile projects. As the risk/reward can vary greatly from one mobilization project to the next. The use of a blended Beta is recommended. This can be calculated by regression or blending similar firms or competitor's betas.

Now you can look at a project through a cost-benefit methodology. Build a model, allowing for a risk-reward-cost metric, allowing for all mobility projects to be compared the same, the project with the highest risk/reward - cost value can then be placed in the production cue all things being equal.

While this is a high-level method, and many other factors should be considered. This approach will provide you or your firm with a simple and effective solution to Enterprise Mobilityproject valuation/prioritization. Other items to consider are if you have a large investment is a back-end system such as SAP or another ERP, time-line issues, and implentation planning done through solid project buleprint methodology.