"Drive-By" Projects and Prioritization

Most organizations don't have any trouble keeping people busy—however keeping people busy and focused on the right things can sometimes be a challenge.  Businesses that rely on project based work to push initiatives forward need to prioritize potential work to ensure that project teams are working on the right projects.

It's not always about separating the good projects from the bad projects, it's often an issue of choosing the best projects, the projects that will provide the most business value, from a list of good potential projects.  In a perfect world, there are many worthy initiatives that could, and maybe even should, be worked on.  Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world.

I believe that's why the "get'er done" or "drive-by" project is such a problem.  Those projects may be worthy, but if they don't measure up to the "does this provide the most value" test, they ultimately limit an organization's capacity to work on the things that do.  And that negatively impacts productivity—and ultimately profitability.

In theory, everyone agrees with this concept.  However, practice is something different.  In the heat of the moment, it's difficult for decision-makers to step back and ask the question, "Will this 'drive-by' project provide enough value that someone should drop what he or she is doing to work on it?"  Sometimes the answer is definitely yes, but there are times when the answer really should be NO.

Project and portfolio management best practices revolve around the concept of identifying those projects that meet certain criteria, creating a plan, and then executing on the plan.  Project management software does a pretty good job of helping do that.  However, sometimes we need to ask ourselves, "How does my work management methodology and project software address the 'drive-by' tasks and projects that come up every day?"  You know the tasks I'm talking about—those that never get plugged into a project plan or added to the Gantt chart.

It doesn't have to be a catastrophic failure that causes an organization to falter.  Sometimes its the accumulated weight of a thousand insignificant inefficiencies that cause the most damage.  How does your work management methodology address the "drive-by" project?  Feel free to share what you do to solve this problem in your organization.