Prioritisation and how the Three Little Pigs got it wrong.

There are two fundamentally different dimensions to prioritisation in a business:

• one is to determine which project should be pursued first, 
• the second is to determine which of the tasks within a project should be addressed first. 

The answer to both those situations is very different. This article talks to the first of those - how to determine which of the your actions/opportunities you should prioritise.

But first, why prioritise at all? Isn’t chaos theory in an organisation going to naturally determine the optimum work load for a wide range of tasks? Isn’t it better to pursue 20 activities in parallel rather than doing them one at a time?

The Three Little Pigs determined to build their houses individually, in parallel so to speak, so that they would all be completed at more or less at the same time (of course the narration means you hear about each pig’s house separately, so it gives the impression of sequential work, but it is really in parallel).

Now what if instead of protection from wolves, they were planning to rent their new houses on AirBNB. If they had all helped each other to build the houses, the stick house would have been completed in 1/3rd the time, the wood house would have been completed in 2/3rds the time and the brick house would have been completed at the same time had they built them per the story. So building in series would have generated them far earlier income streams from their rentals (a better return on investment) than building them in parallel.

Reverting back to the story’s original strategic plan - minimising risk of being eaten - building in series would also have significantly reduced the risks for the first and second little pigs, whilst the risk for the third little pig would have been the same as in the story.

So the answer is, focussing the team on a small number of projects, allowing you to deliver those projects early by having all your resources in synchronism, gets you a far better return than leaving your teams unfocused.In fact, you can show that the act of focusing on a limited number of projects can be as important as ensuring you focus on the highest return projects. You could argue that getting the highest return projects done first is the cream on the cake (or the apple sauce on the pork?).

If the above sounds counter-intuitive to you, don’t worry, it obviously sounds counter-intuitive to many other organisations too. Why else would they let the number of projects and actions run away without control? Why else would they all be so busy in working on their multiple actions but not actually delivering any of them? Why else would they throw so many more actions at you to complete, when you’ve not yet completed the last lot?

Action oriented companies measure success not by the number of actions in progress,
but by the number of actions completed.

How many projects/actions should be in your list? 

It is a much smaller number than most people think and it will depend on how successfully your company is able to manage actions. There are natural gaps in projects and actions, where people are waiting for information/goods etc from others, this time is available for other projects and your daily workload - but should only be available once the priority tasks have been completed. It will take trial and error to get the balance right in your organisation - but always err on less rather than more if you want high returns.

How Prioritise?

How should you prioritise to get at the cream (or apple sauce)? It should be a simple Profit and Loss (P&L) type comparison between the projects. This won’t necessarily be a financial P&L - as it will depend on your strategic objectives and corporate constraints. For example the Income could be “improvements in service quality” whilst the Costs might be “time to implement”. Don’t get hung up on too much detail and analysis in this part, your broad brush estimates and a 20:20 vision approach to prioritising will get you there faster.

Mr Wolf nearly got his meal twice in the story - next time you tell it he won’t stand a chance.