24 Judge ideas carefully
After you have generated 50 or more ideas for your task or project, you now need to judge your ideas and find the one or two best ideas that are worth implementing. Often you will find it useful to pick the top three or five ideas, ranking them in order so that you will have a second and third alternate idea ready if anything happens to remove the first idea from the project.
The best way to rank your ideas is to keep two things in mind:
- You will want to select the idea that will produce the most benefit in completing the challenge or solving your problem.
- You will also want to select an idea that will be the easiest or least costly to implement.
These are just two criteria for judging and ranking your ideas, but this common combination of criteria is often referred to as looking for the “low hanging fruit”, as seen in the chart below.
Another way to view this approach is to perform a cost/benefit analysis. This analysis consists of identifying the potential costs and benefits of implementing an idea and confirming if the benefits outweigh the costs. If the return on the investment of the implementation is not large enough to justify the costs, then another idea should be selected. The challenge of using this approach is estimating with accuracy the dollar value of the costs and benefits.
