When you’re juggling multiple projects it can feel as if you don’t know what should be taking priority at any time. Getting the priorities straight isn’t as hard as it seems. This 5-step approach will help you manage different strands of work and make sure that the right projects get the attention they need to progress.

Prioritizing your work starts with…

Convene a group to prioritize work

First, you need a group of people ready and available to make decisions around priorities. I’d recommend that you include representatives from a wide range of business areas including IT and operational, front-line teams.

This group should meet regularly with the objective of making decisions about what projects and programs are important to the company overall. A neutral function like the Project Management Office should call and chair the meetings.

Tip: You’ll find that people drop in and out of this group as their role changes and the projects they are working on change. That’s fine, just as long as whenever you plan to discuss a project that affects their area that someone with authority to make decisions turns up to represent it.

It will help enormously if you have a clear Terms of Reference for the group. This will make sure that everyone knows what is expected of them and what they should be doing when they come to meetings. It sets out that while everyone is expected to represent and champion projects from their areas they need to be setting their projects in the wider context of the business. In other words, they are making decisions that affect the use of resources across the company so the prioritization team should be considering the impact on the company as a whole.

Agree what information is required

It’s always easier to make decisions when there is parity between the projects you are comparing. You could specify that each project being put forward for prioritization also needs a business case, project charter or any other outline project document so that everyone has the same information to work from. The data from your project plans in Seavus Project Viewer is also going to be important, as it’s hard to make prioritization decisions unless you know the scope and scale of the work involved.

Agree on what information and documentation the group needs to make a decision, and make that clear to everyone.

Create a framework

Now you’ve got some idea about what will be coming into your prioritization forum, you’ll need to set some boundaries and guidelines for how you will prioritize projects. This gives you an objective way to compare projects and to slot them into a hierarchy of importance.

Generally, this sort of hierarchy runs like this:

1. Mandatory projects e.g. compliance/regulatory work

2. Profit-making projects e.g. new products, service improvements

3. Reputational projects e.g. work that improves the brand or avoids reputational damage

4. Tactical projects e.g. smaller pieces of work that make a phased enhancement to something such as process improvement.

You can add as many layers or categorizations to this as you like. Think about whether it’s worth including prioritization around service continuity or environmental and social responsibility.

All you are trying to do is give people a way to rank projects against each other. Then when they are ranked, to say whether one category is more important (and therefore pulls the resources) than another.

Prioritize existing work

Test out your process so far by prioritizing the work you have on the books already. Go through all the existing projects and work out where they fit in your hierarchy. This can take some time because you’ll find that stakeholders whose projects fall way down the list of prioritized work will discuss their initiatives for some time.

Unfortunately, when the outcome is a prioritized list, someone’s work has to be at the bottom and this might be the first time that some of your team have realized that their work isn’t as important as some of the other corporate initiatives, regardless of how important it is to them as a small group or department.

The output of this exercise should be a list of all the projects that you are working on at the moment in priority order. That means that the projects at the top are critical and the ones further down the list are take-it-or-leave-it projects.

Some prioritization groups or PMOs draw a line underneath the last project that can be worked on at that current moment. Say, for example, you have enough resources to support the first 10 projects, the line appears under project 10. Anything below that doesn’t get worked on until something else is finished.

Prioritize new work

Introduce new items as and when there are projects coming to the table to be prioritized. Everyone should be aware that if a new piece of work is ranked as a high priority, it might mean that something else is stopped until it can be picked up again. In the example above, that might mean that the new project comes in at number 9, the existing project 9 drops to project 10 and the current project 10 falls below the line and is paused until resources are freed up to do it.

This 5-step process looks very simple and on paper it is. But in reality getting your organization to agree to this way of working, to break down the silos between functions to get them to come to a prioritization forum and to make company-wide decisions on project priorities is a big job. Are you up to it?