On a Collision Course: How Multiple Top Priorities Sabotage Success

It’s not uncommon for an organisation to have multiple number one priorities. It’s also not uncommon for the organisations that do have multiple number one priorities, for them to end up in a bit of a train wreck. When you have multiple number one priorities you’re sending the wrong messages to your teams.

The message that is being sent

In my experience, when organisations have multiple number one priorities teams hear several things, and none of them are good for the organisation.

Firstly, teams hear that the company’s leadership are too weak to make a difficult choice. That sends reverberations all the way through an organisation. Nobody wants this. The “chatter” in the teams I’ve been in, where there are multiple number one priorities is “please, just pick one”. Most teams don’t actually care which is number one and which is number two. They want guidance.

Secondly, teams now believe that it does not matter which of the number one priorities they work on. That is often not true. A team may be on the critical path for one of the number one priorities, and decide that, for them, they’d rather work on the other number one priority. After all, they’re equal priority so no one can “complain” at them if they make that choice. This is not an optimal outcome for the company.

Thirdly, teams start to question the validity and certainty of the priority ranking system. I’ve seen teams directly challenge it and work on priority seven because “that’s the most important thing for us to work on”. The reason they decide this, stems from the fact that they don’t see the execs making the hard calls, so they gain belief they can challenge the priority system. After all, it has been made really easy for them to challenge. In challenging the priority system, they land on number seven being their number one.

How to prioritise better

We have an obligation to prioritise better and give more guidance to the teams. There are some easy and some more complicated techniques that can be used to create clarity in prioritisation.

The easy one that I’ve always been a fan of is comparative prioritisation. Take your list of things and put them in a random order. Take the first two items in the list and ask “which of these do we prefer”. Place them in your preference order. Now take items 2 and 3 in the list. Repeat all the way down. Keep repeating the exercise until nothing moves rank. It’s surprisingly easy to rank two competing things, even if they’re entirely unrelated. Do you prefer a chocolate bar now, or for there to be no traffic on your way home tonight. You just made a choice - see, it’s easy.

The harder one, which is baked in data and analysis is to use the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Too lengthy to go into detail here, Wikipedia has a good explanation. If you prefer the comfort of data-backed decisions, if you prefer the collaboration and to move away from HIPPO prioritisation, you can try this. It takes time and effort, but it removes emotion and hierarchy away from the decision process.

The role we have to help

As project professionals, we have to help our organisations prioritise better and with clarity.

• be clear what impact the prioritisation will have on your ability to get the right resources onto your project in the right timescale.
• be clear what impact the prioritisation will have on your ability to get stakeholder, sponsor and organisation attention onto your project for the inevitable decision making necessary to keep it moving at speed.
• be firm with teams who have chosen a lower priority instead of working on your project, that this is not an acceptable choice and that your project needs them.

It’s coming to that time of the year when organisations are working on their priorities for their next financial year. It’s hard, it’s emotional and it really matters. Every small difference you can make now, will make a big difference to results achieved next year. Good luck out there.