Criteria are parameters that you can use to assess and compare projects. For example, if your company is deciding to invest in a new product development project, and you are asked to evaluate proposals, you might evaluate them according to the criteria of strategic value, revenue, technical risk, and cost of development.

To manage such a situation with Focal Point, you can assess how well each project fulfills the defined criteria. For each criterion, you can compare the projects in pairs to determine which best fulfills the given criterion, and also to what extent. Focal Point includes methods for reducing the number of comparisons, so you do not need to compare all of the projects to each other. You can also assess criteria by entering estimates; for example, to find how well a project fulfills the cost of development criterion, you might enter 500.

In Focal Point, you enter and structure elements in modules. To filter the elements and attributes in the modules, you define views. You can display views on the Prioritize page; this means that you can prioritize the elements in the view. You enter criteria on the Criteria page. To access the criteria, you define a view that filters the required criteria and attributes. You can link the view that contains the elements to prioritize to the view that contains the criteria to prioritize the elements by.

A workspace is configured as follows:

A user in this workspace can prioritize the elements in the New projects view according to the criteria in the Criteria for project evaluation view. The priorities are visualized in charts.