SMART charts

Back to process and project management. Wayne was tasked with assessing all the archive projects (collections) in the offing and prioritizing them. There are about 30 of them. Today he showed me a technique called SMART Chart for developing his priorities. It comes from the business environment.

On the first sheet of an Excel workbook:

• List in the left column relevant criteria or attributes, such as status of the metadata, status of the content, whether the collection was previously available in the legacy system, whether there will be copyright issues affecting publishing, and so forth.
• Place the collections across the top row.
• Rate the readiness of each collection based on the criteria using, in this case, a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest weight.

On the second sheet:

• Match the criteria against each other by listing them in the left column and also across the top row.
• In each intersecting cell give a 0-4 rating, where 0 represent "much less important" and 4 represents "much more important" and 2 is neutral - neither more nor less important
• In cells where a criterion is matched against itself, enter a 2.
• For the remaining cells, enter an importance rating. For example: is it more important or less important that the metadata are ready versus the collection has already been available (and users are accustomed to having access).
• If a 3 is entered for A versus B, then a 1 is entered for B versus A so that both ratings total 4.
• Add the ratings for each row (for each criterion) to get a total importance rating.

On the third sheet:

• List the criteria in the left column, as in Sheet 1.
• List the collections on the top row, as in Sheet 1.
• Again match each criterion against each collection, this time multiplying the total criterion rating from Sheet 2 by the collection value on Sheet 1. (A macro can be written to do this.)
• The column totals show the number of cumulated points for each collection, with the highest totals receiving the highest priority.

Voila! Your decisions are made!