This doesn't have to be a complete financial calculation filled with internal rates of return, interest rates, NPV, investment assumptions, and those items. This is your gut telling you what the ROI would be. The investment can be time, money, or any sort of expense. Positive ROI's can come in the form of profits, as well as higher customer and employee satisfaction. What we want to do now is simply identify what the expense is and what the ROI is by name.
For example, you may not have a training program for your employees. To have this, you need both time and money. The Return expected can lead to a higher quality employee, engagement, more efficient, and of course there is a direct link to employee and customer satisfaction.
Another example, you may have an operation or a process that needs to improve. With this process improvement you may lower your cost of goods, therefore increasing our margin OR becoming more competitive and being able to sell more product.
When you have your complete list of what the ROI is, simply put a simple rating of 1-5 on the impact of that ROI next to this. The higher the impact, the higher the priority.
For the nerds like me out there you can try to quantify your costs and ROI's, but we want to look at this easily and quickly. Again, have your inner circle go thru the same exercise to start seeing what needs to be done. That's enough for our 2nd step ... how does your picture look?
