How can you balance competing priorities in a sustainability project?

It's very important to make sure that the whole team understands the context of the project. Even if each participant only operates a specific part of the project, it's crucial that everyone has their sights set on the same common goal. This will make the activities much more concise throughout the development of the project.

As you are defining the scope and goals, also define what success and failure may look like. A clearly defined plan that outlines the expected results which translate to success can help the team prioritize which tasks and activities to focus on.

Planning is undoubtedly the most important stage of the project. regardless of the activity management platform, I suggest an exhaustive recap of the project together with the team, so that no stage goes unnoticed. One possible action in this sense that had a very positive effect on me was to propose a kind of pilot mini-project, to be developed while still in the planning stage, which helped me to foresee various mishaps before they became real official problems.

In my experience, setting regular meetings on the stakeholder's calendars insures the highest engagement from all parties. These meetings should be brief and focused on status of the project, help needed, and next steps. These meetings should not be problem solving sessions but rather focus on project status updates only.

Existe una serie de elementos que ocupas considerar para priorizar, así como algunas herramientas que te pueden servir. En cuanto a los elementos, considera las regulaciones, las expectativas de tus grupos de interés, el alineamiento con tu estrategia, las prioridades nacionales de tu industria, la disponibilidad de recursos, tu materialidad, entre otros. Algunas herramientas empleadas en la planificación para priorizar que se pueden emplear en este caso son: matrices de comparación, matrices de priorización, la demanda de trabajo según la percepción del equipo como se aplica en la agilidad, el método Moscow, la pirámide de priorización, ejercicios de costo de oportunidad, entre otros.

Setting a clear prioritization and decision making mechanisms helps you avoid 'competing priorities' and create a better strategic impact. To set a clear prioritization mechanism, you need to assess a number of factors for each sustainability initiatives, feasibility of implementation, resources availability, capacity and capability, time, strategic impact, cost to benefit, etc. Whereas for the decision making, you need to have clarity around the stakeholders who are making the final call, their level of influence, their political power within the organization, consensus-building methods, and whether voting is an option or the 'louder wins'!