When Everything is Important But Nothing is Getting Done

-Higher velocity: projects began to be delivered faster.-Higher quality of work: having the support needed meant less shortcuts taken, more testing, and better delivery.-Lower coordination overhead:coordination and support problems were preempted by a single stack rank. It was clear to everyone how work weighed against each other.-Higher satisfacti... See more

When projects are scoped too large, a few things happen: They take a long time to deliver, which means that work is locked up for long periods of time without creating value.

"High-medium-low" doesn’t scale. At four or more tasks, you’re forced to start doubling down on designations or to create subcategories of priorities. Eventually, you find yourself with a bucket of “high priority” projects wherein you don’t know what to tackle first.

As Fred Brooks pointed out almost 50 years ago, “adding more engineers to an already late project won’t make it go faster”.

Our projects were scoped too large. The larger they got, the longer they took and the more risk and scope creep was introduced.

But traditional “prioritization” — the "high-medium-low" kind that comes out of the cereal box of most project management software — is one of the worst ways to organize work

- Continue this process

-Do one project at a time, in order

I wanted to highlight that there is not a “Just Do This One Simple Trick” solution to challenging organizational problems. These issues build up over long periods of time and form deeply held and sometimes unconscious patterns of organizational behavior. No one intends to build processes that don’t work, but they sometimes implement processes that ... See more

Objectives are great! “Objectives versus priorities” is similar to “problem versus solution” thinking. Objectives tell you the goal and let you figure out how to get there. You set your own priorities and the only thing that matters is if the goal is achieved or not.