Jun. 25, 2008 at 2:14pm

Ration, tier or clone? Part two: evaluate

Posted by Kathleen Deakins in Internal Communications, Planning and Strategy
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Here’s more on the theme of what to do when you have too much to do, a follow-up to my earlier post Part One: Anticipate. Let’s continue with the anticipate-evaluate-negotiate framework.

It’s no surprise that “follow the money” is the No. 1 criterion health care marketers cite for deciding what new project to take on or what to give up. It’s about ROI – generating margin, driving volume or increasing share. But when we probed a little deeper, we found that in practice the criteria are far more complex – and not always logical.

At JayRay’s annual ThinkLab for health care pros, we laughed and sighed over unofficial criteria, from putting a stop to endless nagging of a service line director to stroking the board chair by sponsoring his favorite event.

Questions members of the group asked to determine where to focus include:

• Does it further our business strategy and fit into our overall plan?
• Will it contribute financially – directly or with downstream revenue?
• Will this contribute to our brand strategy?
• Does it advance our mission?
• Does it block a competitor?
• Is it too risky?
• What is the downside of not doing this?
• Will it differentiate us? Is this cool or different?
• Do we have the marketing capacity and budget to do it well?
• Do we have the operational capacity for additional volume?
• Is it fun?

While no one at the ThinkLab used a formal process to evaluate projects, we agreed adopting one could help their organizations focus on the most important and eliminate the dubious.

One simple evaluation approach we considered poses basic questions and plots answers on a scale from low to high. The result is a visual display allowing you to quickly compare the relative value of projects:

Potential contribution to achieving business goal
Low - - - - - X - - - - - High

Risk if we don’t do this
Low - - - X - - - - - - - High

Level of operational readiness (capacity, expertise)
Low - - - - - - - X - - - High

Impact on marketing budget/staff
High - - - - - - - - - X - Low

For a more elaborate evaluation system, we looked at adding a scale to the answers and assigning weights to the criteria. In the example below, you may decide 50 percent of a decision should be based on contribution to business goal with the other factors having less weight in decision making. Some simple math gives you a way to score projects against one another. Could this be a way to appeal to CFOs?

“Nice in theory” was the unanimous conclusion – but get real. We also heard the same verdict from a health system back East that invested considerable resources in a similar elaborate system to learn it was just too complicated.

Here are some takeaways from our ThinkLab:

1. Keep it simple.
2. A good evaluation system must identify what not to do as well as what to do.
3. Involving key players in advance makes it easier for everyone in the organization to accept the tradeoffs.

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