Action Management: Prioritisation
The "Why" question. Why does this action have to be completed. If it is not clear why, then it is unlikely that the action will be given the time needed.
Many, or indeed most, enterprises have too many things to do. The advent of email in particular has driven organisations to concentrate more on quantity rather than quality within their daily actions. A daily inbox of several hundred emails is not uncommon. A ToDo list, or project list comprising many hundreds of actions - all with expectations of delivery by other functions in the organisation is indicative of an organisation under stress.
Yet many of us intuitively understand that it is better to deliver a small number of items well, than many hundreds of items not at all. The real issue is prioritisation and ensuring that once you have established those projects that have priority, that those are communicated to everyone across the organisation. Then everyone in the organisation will understand why a particular project has priority, and everyone will assist in getting it completed.
Let us take a look at two topics, Prioritisation Techniques and Ideal Project Count:
Prioritisation Techniques
There are many different ways you may choose to prioritise your projects or actions, to select which ones are completed first, and which are held back for later. Project Management uses the technique of Critical Path analysis to analyse priority areas but this is not so relevant in the area of Action Management. Here you generally have a choice over which actions are delivered first. There may be some contingent dependencies between actions and projects which you would obviously take into account, but this is not generally the rule.
Some single dimensional prioritisation techniques simply ask to list the projects in order of importance, or value to the organisation. A simple technique here is the 20:00 vision test (you can google this for more details) - this allows you to compare each of the projects in your list with all the others, ultimately arriving at one long list, from which you select the top few to do first.
An improvement on this is the Value vs. Ease chart. This can be either a qualitative or a quantative technique, depending upon how much detailed information you have to hand. The fundamental principle is that the difference between the Value of a project and the Ease by which it can be done is essentially a measure of the "Profitability" of that project. Those with higher "Profitability" are performed first.
To assist in quantifying this, you could choose different values for each of the dimensions such as:
VALUE: e.g. Revenue, Cost Savings, NPV, Benefits - or a democratic vote count.
EASE: e.g. Costs, Time to Deliver, Resource Requirements - or another democratic vote count.
Now, plotting these on an x/y chart will show the highest "profit" projects to the top right hand side and the least "profit" projects to the bottom left. This gives greater degrees of differentiation between your projects to assist making the right choices.
Ideal Project or Action Count
We all know that a thousand actions is too many and that one is too few - but what is the right number of actions? The answer to this involves three truisms:
The top two speak to prioritisation of actions, whilst the last talks to the ability of the organisation to manage actions in a disciplined fashion.