Assessment criteria (specifications)

What is it?

A method of selecting the most promising ideas to develop further.

What is it useful for?

Agreed assessment criteria are useful for taking into account the concerns of multiple stakeholders when deciding the best ideas to take forward.

How can I do it?

Brainstorm, refine and agree a shared set of assessment criteria. These need to be structured to encourage participants to consider the perspectives of the other stakeholders when making their assessments. For example, if you were selecting a product design to take forward into production you might give each of the ideas a score of 1 to 5 on the criteria of:

• Technical feasibility (the engineering team's concern)
• Cost (finance's concern)
• Passion for the idea (the project team's concern)
• Portability and size (some of the customers' concerns)

Score all of your ideas against the criteria then add up a final score for each idea.