As improvement professionals, part of our learning curve is the experience of facilitating project teams that fail miserably. Then, despite the necessary lessons learned, there still remain some very real dangers lurking in any project, but it goes beyond organizing and facilitating a team. What about the choice of project?

In the post mortem—if indeed there even is a post mortem—the question that inevitably comes up for projects that didn’t even get close to desired results is, “Why was this project chosen in the first place?” With a collective shoulder shrug, the consensus many times seems to be, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Here are five project evaluation criteria by Matthew E. May. He suggests scanning the current organizational project portfolio and evaluating your role by giving each project a star rating: one star for each criterion. Ask yourself, “What percentage of my work is five-star projects?”

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