Learn about strategies for determining the feasibility of your projects.

Hello, and welcome to our Impactful Projects and Planning Microtraining Series. I'm Jami Yazdani. And today's session, we'll talk about why and how to consider project feasibility. From a project management perspective, project feasibility is the assessment of a project's elements to determine the project's potential for success. Essentially, project feasibility asks, Is this project something we can and should actually do? project feasibility assessments typically look at whether an organization has the capacity to meet a project's technical, budgetary, legal or regulatory, operational and time requirements? Great. But is this level of assessment even necessary and mission driven organizations? I'd say yes. So it's really been my experience, particularly in mission driven organizations that we conflate project feasibility with adequate project funding. So ideally, we would consider project feasibility as part of our project approval process. I've talked in other project and other micro trainings about project approval, so I'm not going to spend more time on that here. But what I've seen in mission driven organizations is that because our projects are often only possible with grants or special funding, it's really tempting to decide that if we get the money, we move forward with the project, but budgets and funding are only one part of feasibility. And when we put too much reliance on funding approvals as our only test of feasibility, we often miss other important considerations. Again, feasibility considers more than budgeting or funding requirements, so it can help us look at other elements or requirements of our project, and whether we can and want to meet them. Alright, so what does project feasibility assessment look like for mission driven organizations? So I recommend that mission driven organizations that nonprofits, government education libraries, assess a project's needs, and its risks or rewards across five different areas. So people so this is our team, our stakeholders, effort, these are the activities and work required to do the project resources. This is funding, but it could also be equipment tools, timeline, these are the deadlines for the project and the amount of time that the project is going to take and then alignment. And so we want to make sure our project is aligning with our strategic priorities, and our organization's values. So for people, we can ask who might need to be involved with this project? Who will lead activities or perform tasks? Once we've answered this question, it can help us see the risks and rewards involved with the project. For people an example of a risk could be that the project will involve volunteers who have limited availability, while over a ward might be the opportunity to engage with a new community. Of course, your risks and rewards will vary based on the project and your environment. For effort, we could ask how much effort will this project take? What types of activities will be required? Examples of effort risks and rewards would include things related to the work of the project itself? So perhaps the work of this project will need more oversight than is typical of other work we do or projects that we do? Or perhaps this project is really going to involve an untapped unused skill set within your organization's existing capacity. For resources, we can ask what resources from funding to equipment will we need to contribute to this project? Examples of resource risks and rewards might include things related to funding or procurement sources or to tools or platforms. As we work through the people effort and resources aspects of this assessment, we often begin to consider time. So do our teams have the time to expend this much effort? How much time will project activities take? Do we have time to procure the resources or funding we need. So our needs risks and rewards around these areas may already include some considerations of time. And that's fine, I still find it useful to consider timeline as a separate element in the assessment to ensure we are broadening our thinking beyond this specific project. And considering how the project's timeline is going to impact existing operations and other projects that we have. This can really help us put the project in context with our other organizational timelines. So perhaps this project will overlap with an annual event which could create some challenges. Or maybe the timeline for this project is really great, because the project is going to be completed ahead of a busy program cycle. Lastly, we also want to consider alignment. So are there plans or priorities that this project or the project deliverables will address, so if it will address our plans or strategic priorities, we can think about risks and rewards related to those priorities, failure on this project might have a negative impact on the progress we've made toward a specific strategic priority. While maybe success would go a really long way toward more progress on that same priority. If the project isn't addressing a plan or priority, this project isn't in alignment, and that really is a risk in and of itself. So when we put this all together, we can get a pretty good understanding of our project, and how feasible it really is for our organization. When we pair this with a sustainability assessment, which I've talked about in another microtraining, that looks at the short term and long term impacts of the project across these same five areas, we are really in a great position to decide whether this project is something we should pursue. Now, if that level of assessment is just more in depth and your organization is willing to undertake, we can start with a simple feasibility assessment. So we can ask three questions to assess feasibility. First, is this project feasible, given our existing staff and resources? If not, and we need to build capacity in some way or get funding or resources? Is that feasible? And finally, if we already had the capacity or resources, is this how they'd be best put to use by our organization? These three questions get us beyond funding as our only feasibility measure. And allow us to consider our people effort, resources, and alignment. The last question I think, is perhaps the most powerful, because even if we can do this project, should we do it? Or are there other ways we could better use our people, our resources, our time? Are there other priorities and objectives we should be addressing instead?

So when we are assessing a project's potential for success, it's important to think bigger than the project's potential, and consider our organization's success as well. So we may be able to complete the project successfully. But will this project move our organization forward? So those are a few ideas on project feasibility funding capacity is not the same as feasibility. You can assess feasibility by considering project needs, risks and rewards. And it's possible to consider feasibility with a very simple assessment. Again, our goal is to move our organization forward by carefully considering projects before approval. So as I mentioned before project feasibility can be built into your project approval process. For more help with project approval, check out our project approval form template. This free download can help you gather the information needed about your proposed projects to assist with determining project feasibility, and it's available at yazdaniconsulting.com/resources. So if you need more hands on support leading projects, and creating project processes and workflows, visit our project solutions page at yazdaniconsulting.com/projects to learn about our services. Great. So I'm happy to take any questions you have about project feasibility, you can go ahead and add them in the comments. I'll give folks a few moments to add their questions. If I'm not able to answer your question live, or you're watching the replay and have a question, I'm happy to respond later in the comments. Of course, you can also reach out to me directly, you can find all of the ways to contact me at yazdaniconsulting.com/contact, please reach out to me if you'd like to talk about project feasibility. Okay, um, so a question is our approval, our project approval process is pretty informal. How can we be thinking about feasibility? So I would go back to those three questions. Is there a space to ask those questions when project ideas are proposed? So if someone has an idea at a team meeting or a board meeting, is it possible to at least ask that first question? And that third question? You know, could you say something? Like, do we have the capacity to do this? And if we do, is this, how we want to use that capacity? So I find strategic questions to be really, really powerful. And so asking a question like this might start a conversation that helps your organization think more about feasibility, you know, it doesn't have to be on a rubric or a chart, although I do think that can bring consistency to your decision making. Okay, so another question is, how is this different than ROI? So ROI is return on investment. And many ways, it's not that different, especially when it's paired with a sustainability assessment, which looks more at the impacts of a project. And so with feasibility, we are asking about needs are investment with sustainability, we are asking about impacts or returns. And so I do think though, ROI, particularly in a lot of organizations is really only associated with being about cost. So kind of like the idea of if we get the funding for this project, we'll do it. issue. I feel like feasibility and sustainability, especially for mission driven organizations should really kind of go beyond cost, or numbers. There have actually been some pretty interesting conversations in my LinkedIn network recently about ROI for mission driven organizations. So I appreciate the connection. I appreciate the question. It is very similar. I think this is just another way of thinking about ROI that I think probably is more applicable for a lot of our organizations. Great, so feel free to comment or reach out to me with additional questions. So thank you for participating in our Impactful Projects and Planning Microtraining Series. Visit yazdaniconsulting.com/ipp to view all of the sessions in the series and learn about upcoming microtraining Thank you.

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