Five Steps to Determine Project Feasibility
The best way to determine whether your project is feasible is to complete a Feasibility Study. This process helps you gain confidence that the solution you need to build can be implemented on time and under budget. So here’s how to do it in 5 simple steps.
Completing a Feasibility Study
A Feasibility Study must be completed as early in the Project Life Cycle as possible. The best time to complete it is when you have identified a range of alternative solutions and need to know which solution is the most feasible to implement. Here’s how to do it…
Step 1: Research the Business Drivers
In most cases, your project is driven by a business problem. These problems are called “business drivers,” you must clearly understand them as part of your Feasibility Study.
For instance, the business driver might be that an IT system is outdated and causing customer complaints or that two businesses need to merge because of an acquisition. Regardless of the business driver, it would be best to get to the bottom of it so you fully understand why the project has been kicked off.
Find out why the business driver is essential to the business and why the project must deliver a solution within a specified timeframe. Then, we will find out what the impact will be on the company if the project slips.
Step 2: Confirm the Alternative Solutions
Now you have a clear understanding of the business problem that the project addresses, you need to understand the alternative solutions available.
If it’s an outdated IT system, your alternative solutions might include redeveloping, replacing, or merging it with another system.
You can only progress with the Feasibility Study if you understand the alternative solutions to the business problem.
Step 3: Determine the Feasibility
You now need to identify each solution’s feasibility. Ask each alternative solution, “Can we deliver it on time and under budget?”
To answer this question, you must use various methods to assess each solution’s feasibility. Here are some examples of ways you can assess feasibility:
- Research: Conduct online research to see if other companies have implemented the exact solutions and how they have fared.
- Prototyping: Identify the part of the solution with the highest risk and build a sample to see if it’s possible to create it.
- Time-boxing: Complete some of the tasks in your project plan and measure how long it took compared to the planned time. If you deliver it on time, you know your planning is quite accurate.
Step 4: Choose a Preferred Solution
With the feasibility of each alternative solution known, the next step is to select a preferred solution for your project. Choose the solution that is most feasible to implement, has the lowest risk, and you are most confident of delivering.
You’ve now chosen a solution to a known business problem, and you are highly confident that you can deliver that solution on time and under budget as part of the project.
Step 5: Reassess at a lower level
It’s time to take your chosen solution and reassess its feasibility at a lower level. List all of the tasks that are needed to complete the solution. Then, run those tasks by your team to see how long they think it will take to complete them. Add all the tasks and timeframes to a project plan to see if you can do it all within the deadline. Then, ask your team to identify the highest-risk tasks and get them to investigate them further to ensure they are achievable. Use the techniques in Step 3 to give you a high degree of confidence that it’s practically achievable. Then, the results will be documented in a feasibility study report.
Conclusion
After completing these five steps, get your Feasibility Study approved by your manager so that everyone on the project team is confident that the project can be delivered successfully.
About the Author
Jason Westland has been in the project management industry for the past 16 years, managing projects of up to 2 billion dollars. If you would like to find out more about Jason or his new online project management software, visit projectmanager.com.
