Project management includes budgeting and work-planning. However, many decisions are made, often involving diverse groups of stakeholders, during program planning. Priority-setting/decision-making techniques are a useful addition to a project manager’s toolkit. It is also important to pay careful attention to the roles and expectations of all program stakeholders. Not doing so can jeopardize decisions at awkward points in the planning process.
Resources
Online Health program planner 2.0: Project management tools
National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools and Public Health Ontario
The OHPP is a collection of online, interactive health planning tools. There are three related collections of online worksheets: A six step program planning model to help you make evidence-informed planning decisions; The Online Business Case Creator (OBCC) is a three-step process to analyze your project and help you make your best recommendations about whether a project should move forward; and Project Management Tools (PMT) include worksheets about work-planning, budgeting, stakeholder involvement and implementation roles to help you roll out your project. The OHPP also includes instructional content to accompany the worksheets, in the Learning Centre of the tool.
Priority setting process checklist (PSPC)
Public Health Ontario
The document is designed to support PHO’s six-step program planning process. In the process, priorities must be set. These decisions may relate to which risk factors to address, which audiences to focus on, which settings to work in and which approaches/strategies to implement. In this document, a priority-setting checklist is presented. Supporting literature is discussed. The PSPC can be used as you prepare for a priority-setting process, or as a reflection tool, after you have completed a priority-setting process.
Priority-setting: Four methods for getting to what’s important
The Health Communication Unit
This article covers four methods for choosing between a number of priorities. The processes discussed have many applications in program planning for health promotion. This article builds on a one-hour THCU webinar conducted in 2009 about priority-setting techniques including: dotmocracy; paired comparisons; decision boxes; and grid analysis.