Beyond to-do lists: how to prioritize effectively and get things done?
Is there a way to make a prioritization that works without doing it just for the sake of doing it?
There are many ways of prioritizing work and in this post, I will share one of my favorite ones.
Situation:
Your team has blocks of tasks and there is a prioritization needed.
Also, planning to know when to tackle which task and who is involved is needed.
How do you usually handle this?
How do you know if you have enough resources to tackle all tasks?
How do you know if you have the right expertise in your team to solve the challenges?
I have been in the situation of being on a project with a lot of tasks to do by the end of the year. And team wanted to make a prioritization. Where to start? We were simply hating planning without a clue, planning without understanding what is there, what we need to discover, are there any dependencies on other teams.
Is there a way to make a prioritization that works without doing it just for the sake of doing it?
Why do we think we know it all?
We sometimes think that we know it all - we know what works and what is now in our industry - we are expert bias. And in these situations, we sometimes do not realize that we either need to look with the “beginner eye” on things or that we might need help from someone else to get their opinion on things.
If you want to deep dive into breaking down the barriers of expert bias, stay tuned for tomorrow's post about it!
How to get confidence in prioritization and planning?
Visualizing work gives us the ability to lay things out, relate to each other and understand deeply what the context is. In this way, prioritization is easy to be made.
Looking at the complexity behind each task is helpful so that you can build a strategy on how to tackle it.
Here are the 4 categories that you can use in the complexity matrix to figure out what is the priority of your task:
🎲 Obvious: not too difficult, easy to do right away
🎲 Complicated: things that require some degree of expertise; here it would be good that you get to know how much collaboration you need to solve a task
🎲 Complex: we are not sure what is going on but it’s not going to blow up everything, we need to do some research to figure out how to solve a problem or what we need to solve it; the best idea is to create a team to collaborative tackle this task
🎲 Chaotic: novel and extreme problem that interrupts everything else, something urgent, with immediate response needed, ignore anything else; novel situation requires a novel response
🎲 Don't know: no idea what to do with it, not enough information yet to categorize it
It is up to you then how in which order you will tackle them after placing them on the complexity matrix.
My preferred way is to run this matrix but also the “scariness” matrix (which you will see in my post next week) and then cluster the topics and tackle separately the ones that need discussions or a team to tackle them. I approach it as a working matrix and review it at a recurrent time , otherwise it dies there as any other matrix…
One-phrase summary:
As we move in the complexity matrix from obvious to complicated and then to complex, we move from one person who can do alone one thing to a higher degree of collaboration, a higher degree of diversity of thoughts, and opinions, where you want to bring a team together to tackle the tasks. Using this matrix will bring you confidence in prioritization and planning.
Resources:
The Cynefin complexity model
The book “The Collaboration Equation” by J.Benson