Dealing with competing project priorities
Team members usually juggle work on multiple projects, so competing priorities and limited staff time are bound to disrupt project schedules. When your project faces competition from other high-priority projects, follow these steps to optimize results for your organization:
- Verify project priorities with management. Lack of guidance from senior leaders can result in conflicting priorities. Management might not be aware of potential conflicts unless project managers bring them to their attention. Present the project conflicts to management and ask for unambiguous project priorities so the project managers involved can adjust their schedules accordingly. If your project isn’t high priority, move on to the remaining steps in this article.
- Identify the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) scope. To support current organization priorities, focus on the MVP scope for your project. This will minimize the drag on organizational resources while still delivering value to the business. Work with your project team to reassess and reprioritize tasks that focus on the MVP. You can defer or deprioritize non-essential tasks to reduce scope and workload. Moving forward, consider deferred scope items for a separate project when organizational priorities permit.
- Identify the required skills to produce the MVP. Adjust your project staffing to supply the skills needed for the MVP. This adjustment might reduce the demand for senior project team members and alleviate prioritization conflicts.
- Work with other project managers and/or department heads to optimize schedules. Compare staffing needs across projects with your colleagues. You may find ways to optimize schedules by redistributing tasks or sharing resources without overallocation.
- Adjust your project timeline. Reevaluate your project timeline based on the MVP scope, available resources, and when resources are available to your project. Clearly communicate timeline changes to stakeholders to manage their expectations.
- Closely monitor your revised plan. Be flexible as your project and competing projects progress. You might need to adjust your plan again to optimize overall organization results. Regularly monitor and adapt your project plan as needed.
Every project manager has had to deal with competing priorities. How do you approach this dilemma? What changes have you made on past projects? Share with us in the comments section.
For more about project priorities, check out Andy Jordan’s Project Portfolio Management Foundations course.
Coming Up
Marlene Chism is an expert in conflict, anger management, working with difficult people, and having difficult conversations – things most of us want to avoid. Despite the tough topics, she’s a truly lovely person. In this LinkedIn Learning Office Hours, we’re going to dig into some of the concepts she teaches for dealing with conflict. We’ll spend the rest of the session providing practical advice for dealing with conflict and other difficult situations. Bring your questions about the conflict you need help with, and we’ll provide advice for as many as we can fit in!I hope you will join us on Wednesday, January 17, 2024, 11am MT, 1 PM ET for this no-nonsense, advice-packed session on dealing with conflict with composure.
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