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One of the most important challenges that organizations face today is how to prioritize their strategies, their objectives, their projects, and their day-to-day activities. Significant evidence exists that organizations with the strongest focus on prioritization outperform the competition. One of the most important challenges that organizations face today is how to prioritize their strategies, their objectives, their projects, and their day-to-day activities. Significant evidence exists that organizations with the strongest focus on prioritization outperform the competition. Their leaders are laser-focused, not afraid of making tough decisions, and highly disciplined in executing their strategies until goals are achieved. Despite the strategic relevance of prioritization, the available methods for carrying it out are what I call “academic”: They perform well in a test environment; they look good on paper; yet, when they are applied to a real work situation, they fail miserably. I have been working a prioritization concept - the Hierarchy of Purpose - that works in the field, which is useful for the senior leaders, but also for middle management, for project leaders and the people running the day to day activities. I describe this concept in an article featured in Harvard Business Review last December: "How to Prioritize Your Company's Projects" Prioritizing is usually seen as an individual skill that some are good at, others not so much. We prioritize whenever we think about how we will spend our time today, this week, this month—or this year. However, the fact is, prioritizing is also a key organizational capability. Indeed, how and why organizations prioritize their activities is vital to their success. Surprisingly, this is one of the least understood and most neglected areas of organizational life. The word priority appears in the English language as early as the 14th century. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as, ‘what matters most.’ In organizational terms, prioritization sets the agenda in terms of what really matters, which is reflected in how resources are allocated – especially the scarce resources: time and money. Based on 20-plus years of executive experience with large corporations, I have found that one of the main reasons companies fail in this area is that they lack a clear sense of what is truly urgent and simply select the wrong priorities. The results can be calamitous, as evidenced by a classic corporate failure of recent times. It wasn’t that Kodak didn’t foresee the rise of digital photography, but that it chose to prioritize the wrong things. In the 1990s, Kodak invested billions of dollars into developing technology for taking photographs using mobile phones and other digital devices. But in a classic case of Clay Christensen’s innovator’s dilemma, it held back from developing digital cameras for the mass market, because it feared that it would cannibalize its all-important film business. Meanwhile, the Japanese company Canon recognized the strategic priority presented by digital photography and rushed in. If an executive team doesn’t clearly prioritize, middle management and employees will do so, based on what they think is best for the organization. At first, this might appear to be a good practice: empowering people to make decisions is something that has been heralded since the times of Peter Drucker. The key is to have a clearly prioritized set of strategic objectives to work from. A Real Life Example on the Implications of Lack of Prioritization To illustrate this, let’s look at a real-life example. ‘Sam’ worked as a teller in a local bank, serving customers. He loved his job: his father had also spent his entire career in the same bank, but like many other banks, the company was struggling to survive due to low interest rates, increased competition and the burden of cumbersome regulation. The executive team worked for months to identify a new strategy that would help to turn the company around—eventually identifying two strategic priorities that they believed would secure the company’s future. In a series of townhall meetings, the CEO informed staff—Sam included—that the new strategy was based on two priorities: a) improve the customer satisfaction, increasing satisfaction by 20 percent; and b) increase efficiency by serving 20 percent more customers per day. The message was crystal clear: as long as Sam and his colleagues kept focused and met the two strategic priorities, the company’s future—and their jobs—were assured. The following day, Sam was extra motivated, after hearing his CEO say that the company he cared so much about was, basically, in his hands. He kept in mind the two strategic objectives and started to serve customers as efficiently as possible, always with a smile. That worked fine until a customer started to talk about a personal loss and the terrible situation he was going through. He clearly wanted to talk with Sam, who was initially pleased with the idea as it would significantly increase customer satisfaction. However, after a few seconds, Sam froze. But what about the second strategic objective, efficiency? If he spent a few extra minutes talking with this customer, his client-servicing rate would suffer. What should he do? He did not know for certain which objective was more important, but he had to make a decision. As did all the other bank tellers, every single day. The executive team thought that it had clearly communicated the strategic objectives, but in fact, they had created an operational dilemma. The result: the bank did not improve performance and many employees who loved their jobs and worked hard to implement the new strategy, were fired. As this example indicates, all too often, there is a gap and lack of alignment between corporate strategic objectives and those of different business units and departments. The Hierarchy of Purpose To address the challenges of prioritization that I have confronted throughout my career, I have developed a simple framework called the Hierarchy of Purpose. Following are its five principles. Think of your organization’s purpose and priorities. Are all of your employees working according to those priorities? Are their activities prioritized to align with the best interests of the organization as a whole? How would your priorities change in case of a sudden economic downturn? --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez (www.antonionietorodriguez.com) is the world's leading champion of Project Management and Strategy Implementation. He is the creator of concepts such as the Hierarchy of Purpose, or the Project Manifesto; which argue that projects are the lingua franca of the business and personal worlds from the C-suite to managing your career or relationships. Antonio has been recently awarded the title of Thinker of the Month by the prestigious Thinkers50, who identifies the most influential management thinkers in the world, including Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen, Rita McGrath. He is author of the best-selling book The Focused Organization*; has taught at leading business schools (including Duke CE, IE Business School, Skolkovo); has been featured in several magazines, including The Economist, Singapore Management Institute, and Strategy Business Review.  He is the founder of one of the largest LinkedIn think-tank for Strategy Execution, StrateXecution, which has more than 5.500 members worldwide. Born in Madrid, Spain, and educated in Germany, Mexico, Italy and the United States, Antonio has an MBA from London Business School and is fluent in six languages. * use the 50% discount promotional code 'FO230' Impact, Urgency & Priority: Understanding the MatrixJanuary 1, 2020 4 minute read Joseph Mathenge Myles Suer, writing for CIO magazine, states that IT leaders “need to focus upon things which provide value to customers”. These things include the time and effort spent on reducing business friction. When it comes to business priorities, nothing speaks louder than having available and reliable IT services that support business outcomes. Of course, struggles to align IT with business needs are well documented. But if you take a different view—a view of how your handle incidents, changes, and requests—you’ll get a clearer picture on priorities from both sides. To determine whether something is a value-add, you must define, prioritize, and measure the activities that do and don’t support such efforts. Prioritization is vital for IT and business needs: it tells us the relative importance of an incident, so you’ll know how quickly to respond to address it, and how long that effort might take. In ITSM, the most common prioritization model involves understanding impact and urgency. How IT responds, handles, and resolves any request or issue to the business and/or customers depends upon what both parties think about impact and urgency. Though you can boil these components down to a simple mathematical equation, I caution you against this. Instead, looking at impact, urgency, and priority is more about making decisions about relative importance and context. These are items only you and your company can define, not an equation. Let’s take a look at each of these factors and how context and relativity support them. ITILv3 defines impact as a measure of the effect of an incident, problem, or change on business processes. This effect could be positive: a return on investment or customer satisfaction such as a new feature or improvement to a product. Conversely, it could be very negative based on the degree of damage or cost that results. Loss of revenue, manhours, or customers following IT service downtime or poor performance are all negative effects. Usually, impact would not be expressed in absolute terms, but rather a range or degree that is subject to the interpretation of your company’s context. This range might include: A variety of terms can help identify the impact, or effect, of an incident: Remember that words matter: all involved parties must share the same understanding of the scales you use. Clear, common understanding of the impact scale is the first step in effective prioritizing. UrgencyUrgency is not about effect as much as it is about time. A function of time, urgency depends on the speed at which the business or the customer would expect or want something. That might be restoring service to normal operation, or developing, deploying, and delivering a new or updated service or product. The longer that your company is willing to wait or can afford to be delayed, the lower your urgency. Anything that significantly affects your business from an operational, compliance, or financial perspective is generally more pressing than impacts on other perspectives. For example, a VIP’s request or outage to a cloud service covering a whole region would require shorter response and resolution times because it is a more urgent issue. Like impact, urgency scales depend on your business context, needs, and risks. Common scales used in defining urgency are critical, major, medium, and minor. PriorityPriority is the intersection of impact and urgency. Considering impact and urgency offers your company a clearer understanding of what is more important when it comes to a change: a request or an incident. Remember that priority is relative: it defines what actions you’ll take, but these are never set in stone—they can vary as the context shifts. Correlating impact and urgency can be easily done in a simple matrix, which can he hardcoded into your ITSM solutions for an easy way to determine service levels and track performance measures when treating incidents, problems, requests, or changes. Priority scales are usually defined as: Here’s an example of an impact, urgency, and priority matrix. Anything that has both high impact and high urgency gets the highest priority, while low impact and low urgency results in the lowest priority. Best practices for determining impact, urgency, and priorityNo matrix is a one-size-fits-all framework. You’ll want to define urgency, impact, and priority alongside key stakeholders, then continually review your definitions as you encounter various scenarios. What might be high priority to the business might be much lower in the eyes of a third-party vendor; therefore, alignment across all agreements and contracts is critical. One significant challenge I have come across: when users and support teams have the freedom to dictate the impact, urgency, and priority of their submitted issue, you’ll likely see a confusion of priorities. This freedom might be necessary for support teams to give situational context, but it can have a bad effect: most users will likely choose the highest level of priority even for mundane matters, like obtaining a gaming mouse for use even though their work involves spreadsheets. Conversely, support teams are likely to choose lower levels due to their perception of effort involved or performance rating model applied, i.e., not wanting to restrict themselves to shorter resolution timelines that they are unlikely to meet. To address this, you must use policy to clearly define what constitutes each scale and providing relevant examples to guide all teams involved towards a common picture and effective collaboration. Then, of course, you’ll have maintained focus on the particular components, situations, and requests that offer value to your customers. Related readingAccess the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for ITSMThe Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM is the gold-standard resource helping you understand the strengths of major ITSM software vendors, insights into platform capabilities, integration opportunities, and many other factors to determine which solution best fits your needs. Download now › These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion. See an error or have a suggestion? Please let us know by emailing [email protected]. How do you answer summarize resulting impact against your priorities?It's all too simple to respond to a situation as soon as it occurs, without thinking through the consequences or how your action might affect other goals. It's common for us to want to leave a stressful situation as soon as we can. As soon as possible, we want to get rid of the unpleasant feelings.
What is the impact of prioritization?Establishing priorities is necessary in order to complete everything that needs to be done. Prioritization is important because it with allow you to give your attention to tasks that are important and urgent so that you can later focus on lower priority tasks.
How do you prioritize your work to deliver the expected results?How to prioritize work when everything's important. Have a list that contains all tasks in one.. Identify what's important: Understanding your true goals.. Highlight what's urgent.. Prioritize based on importance and urgency.. Avoid competing priorities.. Consider effort.. Review constantly and be realistic.. How do you handle conflicting priorities answer?Schedule Work Effectively. Your first step is to clarify your current priorities and to manage your schedule effectively. ... . Negotiate Deadlines. Once you've clarified your priorities, look at your responsibilities and identify any deadlines that you need to re-negotiate. ... . Manage Expectations. ... . Be Professional. ... . Be Flexible.. How can I contribute toward the priorities and goals?Prioritizing your goals allows you to organize your objectives and better allocate your time and effort. Try these tactics to accomplish your goals!. 1 Identify a few goals. ... . 2 Break down each goal. ... . 3 Measure your progress. ... . 4 Keep yourself accountable. ... . 5 Cut out distractions.. How do you prioritize your tasks when you have multiple deadlines to meet?To help you manage your team's workload and hit deadlines on time, here are 6 steps to prioritizing projects that have a lot of moving parts.. Collect a list of all your tasks. ... . Identify urgent vs. ... . Assess the value of your tasks. ... . Order tasks by estimated effort. ... . Be flexible and adaptable. ... . Know when to cut.. |
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