Do you Suffer from ‘Constantly Changing Priorities’? #2
If you do, this could be the reason:
When you plan your projects, you estimate how long things will take [duration]. But do you also estimate how much work has to be done [effort – for example, in person-days]?
If you don’t, then it means that you don’t know how much stuff has to be done – either in individual projects and across the organisation as a whole.
If you don’t know how much stuff has to be done, then – inevitably – you won’t / don’t / can’t know how many people you need to do that stuff.
Also – inevitably – there won’t be enough people to do all the stuff – all the projects – you’re trying to do.
The result will be so-called ‘constantly changing priorities.
It will happen like this:
1. The year will kick off in January and a bunch of projects will be launched.
2. Because there aren’t enough people to do all the work, it’s only a matter of time before some project or other starts to drift.
3. To fix the drift, people are moved from other projects onto this project.
4. But that causes drift in these other projects.
5. And so back to #3, as the year unfolds in an endless round of ‘constantly changing priorities’.
6. The end of the year comes. The Christmas party. There’s a sense that we’ve had a really tough year – long hours, people putting in huge efforts, constantly changing priorities.
7. But there’s also a sense that we’ve triumphed in the face of adversity.
8. Many projects have been finished. (Though some haven’t.) Were they the right ones – the most important ones?
9. Maybe.
10. Or maybe not.
11. Constantly changing priorities – there has to be a better way.
You can start to fix all of this and break this cycle, by learning how to estimate accurately.
For a (free) paper on the subject look here https://fastprojects.org/2017/08/24/how-to-estimate-anything-accurately/.
One of the many things The Project Management Masterclass https://fastprojects.org/run-any-project-build-a-track-record-of-project-success-have-a-life/ teaches is how to do accurate estimation – of both duration and effort.