Prioritize Action Items and Initiatives

For the action items use the PDCA as your prioritization criteria Action items developed from the Plan gap analysis should have the highest priority since they are essential before moving to the Do stage. Similarly the Do related actions items should precede the Check items and so on. 

For the initiatives, use the Impact versus Easiness matrix to prioritize them. This method uses a set of qualitative and quantitative measures to assign a priority score to each initiative. 

Following are suggested guidelines to determine initiative impact and ease of implementation (see Table 10.2). 

Defining Potential Impact the potential impact of an initiative should be analyzed using selected criteria such as the ones shown in table below. Selection criteria can inclnde initiative impact on department profitability, satisfying operational urgency or other qualitative benefits such as customer satisfaction or employee morale. 

Analyzing Ease of Implementation Ease of initiative implementation could be analyzed using criteria in the fable below. Selection criteria can include the cost of initiative (the lower the better), resources requirement, and time span of initiative (Table 10.3). 

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