Responsible Project Portfolio - Part 2: Our Criteria

Second post in the Responsible Project Portfolio series. Read part 1 here.

What guides an organization’s decision-making? Values, frameworks, protocols, design principles, intuition? All of the above?

In our previous article, we introduced Field States' Responsible Project Portfolio—what it is, why we developed it, and how we use it. Part 2 details the criteria we currently use to evaluate each potential project and opportunity.

At its heart, the RPP is about applied values. We’ve taken the time as a team to discuss, debate, and articulate our studios’ goals… so we should use them to guide our work! By instrumenting our values with a lightweight heuristic, they become more tangible—the ramifications of our actions more clear.

The criteria we use build on our studio's values—such as creating impactful societal change, fostering personal and professional growth, forging partnerships and collaborations with teams we respect, and ensuring economic sustainability (a.k.a. keeping us afloat). Below is a description of each criterion, what they entail, and how we score them.

The RPP is an open framework. We are sharing one version, and invite others to experiment with it, tailoring the criteria to reflect your organization or team, to guide your work.

Criteria

1. Civic & Social Impact

We gauge impact by the extent to which a project creates Shared Value. “Value” across several domains—social, environmental, economic—“shared” by those who are systematically affected (humans and the ecologies we’re a part of).

Shared value is long-term, place-based, and different for each project—emerging from physical land, urban infrastructure, databases, social narratives, population health, histories, and possible futures of a specific place and community. This is defined fully during a project’s discovery phase, by engaging deeply in the context.

Scoring this opens up space for the team to explicitly discuss what kinds of impact the opportunity provides, and the role we may have in stewarding the work toward those impacts. The score is necessarily reductive, but gives a sense of the project’s valence.

→ Score from 0 to 10 based on potential for impact.

2. Local footprint

Field States focuses on creating place-based value, which centers our work on the specifics of places, and leads us to prioritize projects based where we live. This enables us to build long-term relationships, connect more deeply with our proximal communities, and carry insights across multiple efforts. Because our team members live around the world, “local” in our case means where each team member is based.

→ 10 for projects located where a core team member lives or has a deep affinity, 5 if this is true of a constellation team member, and 0 if no team members are connected to the place (note: we will always have partners based in the location).

3. Personal and professional development

With every project, our team grows personally and professionally, as a unit and as individuals. Our team regularly shares personal and professional development goals—honing a skill or engaging a new topic of interest—and hold each other accountable to them. We choose projects and assign team members to them in a way that encourages personal and professional growth.

→ Score from 0 to 10 based on whether or not it enables PPD, with higher scores for more team members’ development.

4. Financial compensation

Because we work with clients that are in very different financial positions—large, for-profit companies, small non-profits, governments, and everything in between—we use a differential rate structure. We cross-subsidize projects to maintain financial solvency.

→ Score 0 for pro-bono, 3-6 for government and non-profit cut-rate work, or 7-10 for full-rate projects. Within those brackets, choose a number based on time spent vs. paid.

5. Bonus points

While the four main criteria capture our organizational motivations, they do not capture all of the reasons for taking on projects. The “bonus points” column allows us to articulate those additional reasons and incorporate them into the project scoring. If a particular factor tends to dominate this column, we may consider adding it as a primary criterion. Examples of point sources include (but aren't limited to):

• Excitement: How personally passionate we are about the project, topic, question, location, or partner!
• Collaboration: How deeply we think we can engage with a client or partner, and how well we align with and respect the individuals and organizations involved.
• Strategic Rationale: How well it establishes a relationship with a channel partner, for example, or engages us with an emerging topic.
• Novelty: How fresh or intriguing the project and/or partner might be.
• Glow: Some projects just resonate with us (and still contribute to our goals).

→ Use this to assign a bonus—include a note explaining what the points are for.

Learning Internally and with Others

As a team, we're testing this system out—it’s a work in progress that will evolve as we use and learn from it. Along the way, we aim to share more insights, and hope you’ll share your own approaches. We're keen on collaborating with others exploring similar methods and concepts.

Stay tuned for part 3 of the RPP series, covering how this system integrates with a visual timeline that guides us toward future portfolio-balancing projects, while also helping plan for capacity.