Skip to content

Lesson 3 — Feasibility and Project Selection

At a glance

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson you should be able to:

  1. Assess a proposed project across the five standard feasibility dimensions.
  2. Apply cost–benefit, payback, and weighted-scoring techniques to compare candidate projects.
  3. Explain the limits of each technique, especially the subjectivity hidden in weighted scoring.
  4. Make and justify a go / no-go / defer recommendation.

Prerequisites

Introduction

A business case argues for one project. Feasibility and selection decide which projects deserve the money at all — usually with several plausible candidates competing for one budget.

The techniques in this lesson are simple, and that is deliberate. Their value is not precision; it is that they force assumptions into the open where they can be argued with. A scoring model that nobody disagrees with has told you nothing you did not already believe.

1. The five feasibility dimensions

A project can be desirable, funded, and still impossible. Feasibility testing asks whether it can actually be done.

Dimension Question Typical blocker
Technical Can it be built with available technology and skills? An integration nobody has done before
Economic Does the value justify the cost? Benefit too small or too slow
Operational Will people use it and can we run it? Staff will not change their process
Schedule Can it be delivered in the time available? A fixed window that is too short
Legal and regulatory Is it permitted, and does it comply? Data protection, accessibility, accessibility law

Operational feasibility is the one most often skipped and most often fatal. A system that is technically excellent and operationally rejected has failed.

Analytics dashboard (illustrative)

The analytics dashboard is technically feasible and probably economically justified, but its operational feasibility is the weak point: the underlying data is maintained by several teams, and if they do not improve data quality then the dashboard will display confident, wrong numbers. That is a feasibility finding, and it belongs in the decision — not in a risk register six months later.

2. Economic appraisal

Three techniques cover most cases. All use the same inputs: estimated cost, estimated benefit, and timing.

  • Cost–benefit analysis — total expected benefit compared with total expected cost.
  • Payback period — how long until cumulative benefit covers the cost. Favours quick returns and ignores what happens afterwards.
  • Return on investment (ROI) — net benefit divided by cost, expressed as a percentage.

Where benefits arrive over several years, a discount rate is applied to reflect that future money is worth less than money now; the result is a net present value. The mechanism is worth knowing because it changes rankings: a project with a large benefit far in the future can rank below a modest benefit next year.

Technique Good for Blind spot
Cost–benefit Quick sanity check Ignores timing entirely
Payback Cash-constrained choices Ignores everything after payback
ROI Comparing different sizes Ignores risk and timing
Net present value Benefits spread over years Sensitive to the discount rate chosen

3. Weighted scoring

Not every criterion is money. Weighted scoring lets you compare projects on several criteria at once: choose criteria, weight them, score each option, and multiply.

Criterion Weight Option A Option B
Benefit to users 5 4 3
Strategic fit 4 2 5
Technical risk (higher is safer) 3 3 2
Cost (higher is cheaper) 3 3 4
Weighted total 4×5+2×4+3×3+3×3 = 46 3×5+5×4+2×3+4×3 = 53

Option B wins on this model. The important part is not the number: it is that the weights are visible. If the sponsor disagrees with the result, the disagreement is now about a stated weight rather than an unexplained preference — which is a far more productive conversation.

4. Go, no-go, or defer

Three outcomes, not two. "Defer" is under-used and often correct: it preserves an option while a dependency resolves, at the cost of delay.

Whatever the outcome, record the reasoning. When the same proposal returns in a year, nobody will remember why it was rejected, and the argument will be had again from scratch.

Key terms

Term Meaning
Feasibility Whether a project can be done, assessed across technical, economic, operational, schedule, and legal dimensions
Cost–benefit analysis Comparing total expected benefit against total expected cost
Payback period Time until cumulative benefit covers the cost
Return on investment (ROI) Net benefit divided by cost, as a percentage
Net present value (NPV) Future cash flows discounted to today's value, minus the investment
Weighted scoring Comparing options on several weighted criteria
Go / no-go / defer The three possible selection decisions

Worked example

Task: choose between two candidate projects for one year's budget. All figures are invented to demonstrate the method, and are labelled illustrative.

Step 1 — State the candidates and the budget. Option A: the analytics dashboard, cost 20, expected annual benefit 12. Option B: the public service information system, cost 40, expected annual benefit 18. Budget: 25.

Step 2 — Apply the constraint first. Option B costs 40 and cannot be funded this year at all. This is the cheapest and most decisive test: can we afford it? No financial technique is needed to reject an option that exceeds the budget.

Step 3 — Check feasibility. For Option A, economic feasibility looks acceptable (20 cost against 12 per year), but operational feasibility is questionable: the dashboard depends on data quality owned by other teams who have not agreed to improve it. That is a genuine blocker, not a risk.

Step 4 — Test sensitivity. What if the benefit is 8 rather than 12? Payback moves from under two years to two and a half. Still plausible, but the case is now marginal. Identify which assumption the answer is most sensitive to — here, the time saved by staff, not the dashboard itself.

Step 5 — Decide. Defer Option A until the data-quality owners commit, because proceeding now would spend 20 to produce a dashboard that may be wrong. Reject Option B for this budget cycle on cost, and record the reasoning. Deferral is a decision, not an absence of one.

Step 6 — Record the basis. Write down the two assumptions the decision rests on, so that the decision can be revisited cheaply if either changes.

Common misconceptions

“A positive ROI settles the decision”

It settles the economic dimension. Operational, legal, and technical feasibility can each reject a project that looks excellent on paper.

“Weighted scoring is objective”

The weights and the scores are judgements. The technique's value is transparency, not objectivity — a score presented as fact stops the very discussion it was meant to start.

“Rejecting a project wastes the work”

The analysis is reusable. A rejected project with recorded reasoning is cheaper to re-evaluate next year than one that was never assessed.

Practical activity

Select a project. Choose two of the example projects and treat them as competing proposals for one fixed annual budget.

  1. Assess both across all five feasibility dimensions, naming the weakest dimension for each.
  2. Build a weighted scoring table with at least four criteria; state where each weight comes from.
  3. Test the result with a sensitivity check: change one assumption and see whether the ranking flips.
  4. Write a recommendation of one paragraph, choosing go, no-go, or defer, and naming the assumptions it depends on.

What "good" looks like: a ranking that changes when one input changes, plus an explicit statement of which assumption you are least confident about. Label all invented figures as illustrative.

Self-assessment

  1. Which feasibility dimension is most often overlooked, and why is it dangerous?
  2. Why does a discount rate change which project looks best?

  3. Your weighted scoring model says Option A, but the sponsor strongly favours Option B. What is the useful response?

  4. Apply it — project selection. Two candidates compete for one year's budget. A: an accessible online forms service built by a supplier, mandatory under disability accessibility law, fixed price, no revenue attached. B: an internal analytics dashboard whose case claims a 20% saving in staff time, based on a figure nobody in the planning office can source.

    Hint: A strong answer names the feasibility dimension that decides between them, and says what evidence is missing from the other.

Show answers
  1. Operational feasibility — whether people will use and run the result. It is overlooked because it is not technical and not financial, and because assuming adoption is easier than testing it. It is dangerous because adoption failure produces a delivered system with no benefit, which is the most expensive kind of failure: the cost is spent and the value is absent.
  2. Because it values near-term benefit more highly than distant benefit. Two projects with the same total benefit can rank differently if one returns it sooner, and the gap widens as the discount rate rises. This is why timing belongs in the model rather than the commentary.
  3. Ask which weight the sponsor disagrees with. The model is a way of making preferences explicit; if the sponsor's judgement overrides a weight, then recording that new weight improves the model for next time. Silently deferring to authority, or silently sticking to the number, both waste the real information: which criterion matters more.
  4. Fund A. The deciding dimension is not economic but legal and operational: an accessibility obligation is a must-do, and a weighted score that put B first would simply be hiding the weight that was assigned to cost saving. B's case cannot be assessed at all yet, because its economic feasibility rests on an unsourced 20% figure: either measure the baseline or treat the saving as an unverified assumption, which also means the weighted scores for cost and benefit are guesses. The useful output here is not a ranking but a decision: A funded now, B deferred until its baseline is measured.

Summary

  • Feasibility has five dimensions; operational feasibility is the most commonly skipped and the most commonly fatal.
  • Cost–benefit, payback, ROI, and net present value each trade precision for simplicity, and each has a blind spot.
  • Weighted scoring is valuable because it exposes weights, not because it is objective.
  • Go, no-go, and defer are all decisions; record the reasoning so the same argument is not repeated next year.

Further learning

Next

You have completed Module 02. Continue to Module 03 — Integrated Project Planning.