Priorities

Have you ever worked for someone who said ALL requirements are high priority ? Yeah ! We all have. Customers often are insistent upon the delivery of a certain feature set by a certain timeline that may seem impossible to meet. If everything is high priority, nothing is !

Project teams often bear of the brunt of this indecisiveness. Impossible targets, lack [...]

The “secret” code to success and advancement in any organization is to make yourself more valuable, align with organizational goals, attract like minded individuals who want to make a difference, and take the initiative.
Several recent indicators support this path.

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I’m looking for some insight from all of you on a point that’s been bothering me lately. On many recent projects, “time to market” has been defined, and rightly so, as the top priority (I still use the triple constraints as a key organizing/prioritization guide). Given the competitive pressures and the related shortened [...]

efficiency, stated Peter Drucker, is doing the thing right, but effectiveness is doing the right thing – through enabling others to reach their potential – both thire personal potential and their corporate or institutional potential.  (quoted in DePree, 1989, pp.19(2).
Here are some typical oversight areas:

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In a previous post long ago I urged setting priorities even though everything SEEMS to be #1. Why don’t people set priorities? I think it’s because they don’t understand how to use them properly and fear they will result in critical work being back-burned forever. Not so – priority lists actually INCREASE [...]

I once worked for a semiconductor company, in a business development role. I was new to the industry and so when “Doug” the test manager invited me for a tour of the test floor, I readily agreed.
We spent about an hour touring the facility, discussing the challenges of the test floor, and generally getting to [...]

Scope, Schedule, Cost – they are classics, but do they remain useful?. I’ve heard many practitioners call the Triple Constraints (TC) obsolete or, at least, inadequate.
Many PMs point out that we need to factor in quality. I don’t have a problem with this one. On the other hand, I didn’t know that Scope didn’t include [...]

One thing is for sure, there is always more to do on any project than there is time or money to do it. And as much as people hate to choose between things that seem equally vital, if everything is top priority, nothing is. Project teams used to ask for a list of “musts” and [...]