The key reason why your projects are delayed, your support team is slow, and overall your company doesn’t seem to make progress is a lack of a priority system.

Prioritizing tasks, tickets, cards, goals, etc., its not a matter of ordering work. It is a valuable tool to discover what is your critical path.

Here is a simple priority system. You should start by labeling your work from Priority 0 to Priority 3 (P1-3):

P0: it is something that should be taken care of ASAP. If someone is not doing this right now, today will be a wasted day. You don’t need to put everyone working on this, but the people can be solved more quickly. 

A P0 task or ticket means that it is preventing other people from moving forward right now, and it is causing a loss in time or money. It affects multiple projects or multiple clients.

P1: it is something that it is not urgent, but should be addressed within 24hs. You have some room to plan for it. Typically affects only one project or one client.

P2: there is a workaround for either the team members or the clients. It doesn’t matter how many projects/clients affect, as long they are aware of the workaround. It should be fixed within a week, and it doesn’t need to disrupt any plan.

P3: this is the default priority. Support teams won’t have P3s, because they need to take care of clients’ requests as soon as possible. The rest of the teams are working on P3s; these are normal, regular, planned tasks that can be worked on in parallel, and it not blocking anyone’s progress.

By default, everything that you’ve planned is P3, until it blocks someone’s progress. Then it should scale, all the way to a P0. 

Usually, the critical path will be in a range of P2 and P1, and people tasked with these priorities should have the support of all the team, and yours.

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Leo Celis