Most businesses have more projects or "initiatives" than they can possibly cope with. Often, the limiting factor is not money but availability of people; management time and attention is often the scarcest resource. Sometimes unmanageable complexity is the rate limiting factor.

For all these reasons, management teams often have to chose between different project proposals and arrive at an agreed manageable portfolio of projects. Assigning project priorities can be a difficult and sometimes emotional process.

Ideally, a project proposal should be of high business importance with a very high chance of success. These are rare! Often proposals are of high potential business benefit but low chance of success (a gamble) or low business impact but high chance of success (an early win), or no business impact at all but certain success (a complete timewaster!).

The Project Selector knowledge base helps you or your business team to assess what priority a particular project should have and where it fits in your project portfolio.

This includes impact on future profits, the cost of not doing it, the options it provides and whether it is mandated eg for legal or safety reasons

This includes a consideration of the support for the project from customers, management and staff and the project complexity and access to skills both technical and management.

• EMU presents threats and opportunities to all UK businesses, large and small, whether or not the UK joins the euro zone.
• Managers need to be preparing business plans now.
• EMU will impact many aspects of the business - not just information systems.
• Marketing, purchasing, finance, legal, human resources will be affected to some degree.
• Most importantly, customers, suppliers and competitors will also either take advantage or be disadvantaged by the changes the euro will bri

The EMU knowledge base helps you assess how prepared your business is to meet the threats and opportunities of EMU. It provides a disciplined and engaging process that assists managers from all parts of your business to come to common understanding of what needs to be done. The issues it covers include:

• Impact on business strategy, including competition strategy, customer expectations, supplier capabilities, pricing transparency, pricing displays, pricing points, and the opportunity to reduce transaction costs.
• Impact on systems including transaction and reporting systems, linked systems and cash handling systems.
• Legal, financial and personnel issues including contracts, treasury operations, bonds and equities, relations with banks, pensions, increased wage transparency and training requirements.
• Accountabilities for preparing for EMU