Resources Capabilities Importance Urgency

In this figure it can be seen that there are a number of project’s requiring low levels of creativity, as represented by the green and blue circles. It makes the most sense for organization to tackle these projects quickly and achieve the business returns that result. The more difficult projects requiring the yellow, orange and red levels of high creativity should be tackled second. Again the issue is typically the limited number of high-thinking-level personnel available (the constraint resource).

The advantage of displaying projects in the colored bubble format is it allows everyone in the organization, from professional staff to senior managers, to understand the appropriate challenges and processes to be used in tackling each project. It also allows senior managers to see that some of their highly important and urgent projects may nonetheless require more internal and external resources than they originally envisioned. To have an extremely productive organization, its important senior managers understand these patterns and communicate realistic expectations to the organization (especially project leaders).