The “Opportunity Screening Worksheet – Second Cut” figure shows the detailed questions and scoring. Also provided is the “Opportunity Screening Worksheet – Third Cut” figure. During the second and third cuts, promising ideas get more attention. As the idea gains strength, evaluators may choose to make a phone call or two, or look up a few facts about the market to support the ratings. The projects are again rank ordered by total score. This allows selecting just the top projects for the final cut. However once again, taking the scores and plotting them on a radar spider diagram allows a pattern analysis to show which of the six areas are the company’s strongest or weakest. This is important for future human resource planning.

Before stopping one last cut is made. A quick look is taken at all the projects that didn’t make the third cut just to make sure that any one that has a strong individual champion doesn’t get missed. After this, the projects are again rank ordered, and those selected for a final report and insertion into the first stage of the Stage and Gate process are identified.

The following metrics are provided for one company’s experience:

Raw Ideas Screened 1180
Ideas Surviving Question Zero 130
Ideas Surviving First Cut 93
Ideas Surviving Second Cut 67
Ideas Surviving Third Cut 47
Ideas in Final Report 22
Overall Survival Rate 1.86%