Prioritization Gets More Done

 

Your project workers are busier than ever. They are working on your project, other projects, and completing work for the organization as a whole, going to training, charity work, special initiative team activities and more.

It is easy to let this overwhelm your ability to succeed in your project. Don't let it! There is still a way for you to get work done more efficiently. You have a powerful tool called prioritization. Prioritization is powerful because:

• It works better the more work project workers have weighing them down.
• When you prioritize what should happen in the project, you are being positive rather than saying what is going wrong.
• Project workers are still empowered to do their own work, so you do not appear to be controlling.
• You do not point out anyone's inadequacies, you focus on key tasks.

And it's not difficult to find times to use this tool. Opportunities to prioritize occur naturally in your duties as a project manager, for instance when you

• Tell work teams about the upcoming tasks
• Communicate to project workers about what is expected in the upcoming phase
• Conduct a kickoff meeting
• Talk with a team about their percent work complete on a set of tasks.

What you can probably improve on is using "prioritization language" more during these opportunities. Two key terms are urgent and important to the project. Urgent means the due date is now or very soon. An urgent task may need to be done, but does not have to be important to the project. Many urgent tasks are not very important.

A task that is important to the project has more value to the success of the project. For example,

• A task that removes a risk causing the project to be overall status Red is more important than getting meeting notes out within the expected time.
• One task may be a higher priority because it is on the critical path and another task has in actuality an extra week to complete before it delays the project schedule as a whole .
• An activity might be a higher priority to your project because you have plenty of evidence that there will be delays associated with it, so you want to make sure it is started on time or earlier.

You don't want project workers bogged down in lower-priority urgent work and not getting to what is important, but that's what commonly happens. The vicious cycle is that once people focus on non-important urgent items, they take their eyes off of important tasks that can reduce the number of urgent tasks, causing more past-due frantic work. Putting out fires replaces time for team work planning.

Within any week, you can set and communicate the high-priority work tasks. You can also ask what non-urgent activities are interfering with time for important (high-priority) tasks. In my next post, I'll cover ways to communicate priorities so that the important work will take precedent in the project workforce. You'll also see how prioritization can help you build your reputation.

In the meantime, let me know what you are experiencing in your project workforce related to priorities (or lack thereof) and I'll try to use your examples in that post.