The Priority Problem: How a Shared Understanding Can Help
Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.
"If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority."
This quote frequently resonates with project managers in some form or another. Deserving of a small smile or chuckle, the problem it describes is hardly a laughing matter. Organizations continually have difficulties when it comes to prioritization:
- Projects compete with each other for funding
- Departments protect their initiatives
- Executives introduce new priorities on top of everything else
- Customers demand faster delivery
And somewhere in the middle of everything, project teams are trying to figure out which one of the 65 items on their respective to-do lists is actually supposed to be worked on first.
Prioritization tools aren’t the problem—it’s finding common ground on what matters.
The Priority Problem
It isn’t the intent that organizations create a lot of problems for themselves. Unfortunately, though, they seem to accumulate them.
Some strategic initiatives get the green light. Almost on cue, regulatory requirements materialize. Now one of your big customers wants a new feature. Another person notices that it’s time for a necessary tech upgrade. To top things off, someone in the executive branch makes an announcement stating that it’s now the company’s focus to carry out a transformation initiative in the coming year.
So now, the …
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"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them." - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
