Prioritising projects

Eighty requests, room for twelve. Anyone can sort a list like that by a score. The hard part isn't the sorting — it's being able to explain, six months later, why these particular twelve were the right ones.

Migreat! from Promigion keeps two things separate that usually get blurred together: how healthy an idea looks, and who actually chooses it. The first is a score. The second is a decision. Only the second is a choice you have to be able to defend.

Why a ranking doesn't solve this

Almost every organisation already has something to sort requests against: a points system, an intake form with weighted questions, a standing review meeting. That rarely changes the pattern above, for two reasons.

The output of that exercise is rarely still current by the time the real call gets made — another request has come in since, or nobody's touched the list in a while. And even a current ranking still isn't a decision: it says what looks worth doing and in what order, not who's accountable for choosing it. That part usually happens separately, and often informally — after which nothing is left on record showing who chose what, or why.

Both problems trace back to the same gap: there's no fixed point where one turns into the other.

What Migreat! already does here

Every idea gets three scores, calculated automatically: completeness, likelihood of success, and strategic contribution. The score is a health check, not a decision — it says what's still missing, not who chooses it. How it's built is covered on the from idea to an approved project page.

What actually moves an idea forward is something else: a decision, with its own place in the system. There's one named decider, a mandatory reason for rejection, and a decision that, once taken, doesn't change — a new decision gets added instead, the old one stays as it was. The same page covers exactly how that works.

That's the distinction this guide is about: a score tells you how an idea is doing. A decision is where "why this one and not that one" gets an answer that still holds up six months later.

What this doesn't automatically do for you

Migreat! assesses every idea on its own. There's no screen where you lay eighty ideas side by side and approve twelve of them in one go — every decision is its own request, with its own decider and its own record. That's deliberate: whoever chooses idea A doesn't have to be the same person, or weigh the same things, as whoever chooses idea B.

What that does mean is that choosing which eighty ideas to assess, and in what order, stays your organisation's call. Migreat! makes every individual choice traceable; it doesn't make the comparison between ideas for you.

How to tell whether this is happening in your own organisation

You don't need to look up a single decision to know whether this applies to you.

Can you look up who signed off on a project approved last quarter, and why — or would you have to ask around?
Has an idea ever been rejected without a reason on record?
If an assessment sits unanswered, does anyone notice on their own, or only once the requester chases it?

A "no" to one of the three is normal. A "no" to all three means prioritising, for you, is a conversation rather than a process.

Why this link — from prioritising to a decision — stays informal in most organisations is covered in the guide from strategy to delivery. More on this subject is in the guides.