"The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities" - Stephen Covey
Organizations of all sizes are aware of the struggle – too many projects and ideas with not enough time or resources. So how do you decide what the highest value initiative is for your organization & what to spend your limited time & resources on?
To start it’s important to understand your organization's overarching goals as well as how these objectives relate in value to one another. Prioritization drivers are the drivers that align with your organizations overarching goals or KPI’s. Most organizations have multiple quarterly and long-term goals, however, it’s important to understand how these goals relate to one another in value and impact. Defining your drivers and aligning on priorities is a great place to start.
One of the most challenging problems we come across in organizations is breaking down the barriers of an organization split into silos. It’s very easy for organizations to get trapped into silos where each silo is aware of their own pain points, ideas, and initiatives but not how they relate back to the organizations overarching goals or drivers. In this case, it is very important for transparency of defined drivers across the organization to help understand the impact of ideas and projects on the goals to be able to better align on the value of initiatives in a quantifiable manner.
Example Drivers:
Increase Sales/Revenue
Reduce Costs
Improve Profitability
Improve Productivity
Improve Brand Position
Compliance (Legal)
Improve Quality
Increase Capacity
Improve Customer Satisfaction
Improve Tech/Readiness/Stability
Improve Customer Retention
What are the drivers in your organization? Are the projects & initiatives your organization is pursuing the ones that offer the most impact on your overarching goals?