The whole challenge of prioritizing work – both at individual and group levels – has been on my mind lately. There are no formulas and fixed rules will fail, but there are guidelines.
A critical skill is to say No or at least Not Now. There’s room for dialogue about project value from the “bottom up” perspective, but my observation is that making the clear call of This and Not That require authoritative (which is different than authoritarian) leadership. There is only so much energy available, so where to focus it, and why? What is true at the racetrack is true in real life: If you bet on every horse in the race you will have bet on the winner, but the odds are constructed so you lose money.
Most organizations have a broad portfolio of projects and objectives. The nature of operations work — execute a process to create a product or deliver a service — will take every bit of energy you can give it; there are always opportunities to do more, including process improvements. We must intentionally grant and protect energy going into discovery and creating innovative solutions. The principle is two-fold: set a cap on operations and existing product support (looking for efficiencies), and carve out enough for creating the next new things.
A big mistake I’ve seen (and made) over and over in my career: Believing you can optimize for more than 1 thing. Determine the #1 criterion for optimization, and make sure everyone knows it. You can pick a secondary optimization criterion after that. I’ve never seen a 3rd optimization criterion be effective. Choose which problems you prefer to have. A painfully-learned lesson – be wary of situations where two key stakeholders want to prioritize a portfolio on different criteria. That guarantees a no-win and a surplus of irritation.
Concentration and focus produce valuable results sooner. We generally try to execute too many projects in parallel.
An under-appreciated aspect of managing a portfolio (yours, or a group’s) is leaving margin. Not everything works perfectly. No one can run past their red-line for long without consequences. New opportunities will surface and if there is no intentional margin then those opportunities are nearly impossible to exploit. I find it fascinating that in enzyme pathways and healthy ecosystems most processes operate at about 80% of theoretical maximum – and things go badly awry when those same processes operate above 90% for long.
[Important to hold in tension with this last paragraph: Laziness and sloth is unacceptable. We must be self-disciplined. Exercise physiologists in the US Army teach that your first sensations of pain come at the 50% mark, most likely as a self-protection mechanism to limit actual damage. When you start thinking you can’t do more, you probably have 30-40% left in the tank. The mind wants to quit long before the body. The mind-body relationship is deep and complex. We can and should push ourselves for excellence and achievement, so long as we are also getting appropriate recovery time.]
There is also the importance of making adjustments as new information becomes available. You can drive hundreds of miles in the dark even though your headlights only go 200 feet if you are watching and steering as you go forward. Drowsy drivers hit ditches; same for drowsy project managers.
I suspect we need to step our ability to be integrative thinkers, not accepting simplistic either/or scenarios. “If you can define the problem differently than everybody else in the industry, you can generate alternatives that others aren’t thinking about.” (Roger Martin)
What have I missed?
