Prioritization is hard. If it wasn’t, much of the entire discipline of Economics would likely not exist.
From managing scarce resources, to trying to do more with less, or even making hard decisions on what your organization should stop doing entirely, the challenge to prioritize is one that every business leader contends with regularly.
Undertaking too many initiatives at the same time can lead to:
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Unrealized value
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Missed timelines
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Low employee morale
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Change fatigue
The first key to effective prioritization is to acknowledge to your teams that all of what they do is important. If it were not so, they would not be doing it in the first place. Prioritization should be less about negotiating on what’s important and focused on determining what is truly essential for the collective organization.
When working with clients, our Prioritization approach focuses on creating the Criteria, Processes and Tools to help inform leadership decisions on three critical things:
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What new initiatives to start doing
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What existing initiatives to stop doing
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Which areas of your portfolio to optimize (combining initiatives, better sequencing of initiatives etc.)
Getting there will look different for each organization based on different and unique needs, but these tips will leave you with anecdotal principles for effective prioritization (and our team also really loves analogies):
Water And Oil Do Not Mix Well
Science has taught us that putting liquids with different densities in the same container will result in one always rising above the other. The same simple principle is true for prioritization.
Different types of initiatives in your organization have different attributes and benefit drivers.
Trying to compare a revenue-generating Research & Development initiative with a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiative can be an ineffective exercise. There’ll never be a one-size-fits-all criteria to assess initiatives with different attributes.
It is important for organizations to define a few categories of initiatives that allow them to use the appropriate criteria to prioritize similar types of initiatives.
TSA Pre-Check Works Well, Until Everyone Tries to Use It
Invariably, there are some critical and time-sensitive initiatives for your organization that need to get done without going through the wringer of your standard Prioritization process.
A regulatory compliance audit. A product recall. These should zip through the line like someone going through TSA Pre-check.
When designing Prioritization frameworks with our clients, we spend time determining which types of projects fit into this category and equally as important, which ones should not. If everything becomes ‘critical’ then that defeats the whole purpose of Prioritization.
How you prioritize, assign attributes and categories, and determine urgency will help you focus on what matters most, and help stimulate growth and differentiation in your marketplace.
Working with us, you can expect a big picture approach, identifying prioritization criteria that will drive the best data-driven decisions, and deliver strategic value to your organization.
