Finding the right solution for your project

Project professionals love change and delivering results. But in the rush to get going, robust options analysis, or optioneering, is often overlooked.

Done well, options analysis ensure projects, products and options are properly defined before committing to a solution. Skip this step and you risk creating oversimplified solutions or potentially ignoring a much better solution altogether.

“It happens much more often than we think,” said Gerard Menezes, a project consultant, in a recent post on the APM Community. “Shaping or optioneering… is one of the most critical phases in any project’s life cycle, and once we pass this stage, our ability to preserve value/influence outcomes/realise ‘promised’ benefits drastically reduces.”

So, let’s take a look at some methods and approaches to analyse our options.

Evaluate ideas

A simple SWOT analysis may give you a good idea of the relative strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of each option. Likewise, some form of multi-criteria analysis, with weighting given to assigned criteria, will give early pointers.

Cost is certainly a key consideration, which is where a cost-benefit analysis can be useful. Before ruling a solution in/out it’s important to understand the cost of delivering those benefits. You may find that lower-value benefits are too costly to deliver or that additional benefits don’t deliver the hoped-for value.

Narrow the focus

Another option is the Double Diamond model, developed by the British Design Council. The model is designed to explore ideas widely before narrowing the focus to find a solution. It consists of four stages: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver.

Writing in September’s Project journal, APM’s Head of Digital Steve Watson and Head of Knowledge Scott Walkinshaw describe the process:

“The discovery stage of an options appraisal involves divergent thinking and is enhanced by having a diverse range of inputs.

“From Discover, we move into the Define phase, where we begin to refine and define the challenge or problem and gain clarity and agreement on what problem or need the eventual solution needs to address or meet. This involves convergent thinking.

“Having clearly defined the problem, we enter the Develop phase, where we can now expand our thinking again and explore and identify solution options. As we frame the viable options that are available, your favoured option may disappear or become modified, which is why providing evidence to support your arguments is important.

“Finally, having thoroughly analysed your options and selected the best, we can move to Deliver. This stage involves more convergent thinking to home in on the chosen solution, confident that alternative options have been thoroughly tested.”

Gathering feedback

A good way to evaluate ideas is to carry out user testing. Surveys and interviews can provide useful insights but can also raise more questions. Users often use your solution differently than you envisage or reveal benefits you hadn’t planned for.

Moderated user experience testing involves giving representative users a wireframe or prototype of a proposed solution and allowing them to explore it freely and provide feedback on their interactions and experiences.

There are many different types of user testing, one of the most common is A/B testing. This is often used in product marketing to compare two versions of a chosen option. Option A may lead with a particular product benefit while Option B is crafted with a different message. The one that produces the better response becomes the preferred option, a useful test of user behaviour.

Do nothing differently

In some cases, the best solution may be the ‘do nothing’ option. This shouldn’t be seen as a negative, said Hazel Jell, an IT project manager contributing to the options analysis discussion on the APM Community:

“I recently had a situation where this was interpreted as literally doing nothing, rather than 'do nothing differently' or 'continue as we are now'. How this is pitched as an option is important to getting the right attention.”

She added: “[Do nothing] is very quickly dismissed; shiny new things are more attractive!”

Whatever the decision, to stick or twist, each option still needs to be scrutinised and more than likely moderated before a solution can be reached. This can be challenging, especially for project managers used to managing tight deadlines. The natural instinct is to get on with delivering the project, but there is an art to knowing when to move to the next stage. Remember, your goal is not to rush the final decision, it’s to deliver the best solution for your project and your end users.