Planning and Task Prioritisation

There are several factors that go into planning the best way forward in your projects. One of the most useful skills project managers learn and work to improve is in planning the way the work itself is prioritised.

The order in which tasks are scheduled and completed can significantly impact your project's success. Various factors determine the importance of tasks, some tasks are particularly important, some carry significant risks and some rely on the completion of others. It is essential to take all of these factors - among a few others as well - into account to structure and execute your project as effectively as possible.

It is helpful to position the early stages of your project with your stakeholders as a discovery phase. Make it clear that during this phase, requirements, engineering realities, dates from dependencies and so on will all become clearer.

Milestones and Dependencies

One of the first things to look at are the milestones and dependencies that come with every project. Milestones might include executive check-ins, dates promised to customers or roadmap goals set by the team. Dependencies often involve coordination between different teams, whether within the same organisation or with external partners. It is essential to identify and design your plan to accommodate these dependencies, which are often quite inflexible and as such often create the scaffolding around which the rest of your project tasks are scheduled.

Task Risk

In "Addressing Ambiguity", we talked about how there are often a great many unknowns with some tasks. The requirements for the task may not be clear, it may not be obvious how the task will be executed, how long it will take or what will be needed from a partner team. It is best to schedule these ambiguous and therefore high risk tasks as early as possible. Doing so helps you discover all the things you don't know as soon as possible, which has a number of benefits.

Furthermore, it is helpful to position the early stages of your project with your stakeholders as a discovery phase. Make it clear that during this phase, requirements, engineering realities, dates from dependencies and so on will all become clearer. Scheduling high-risk tasks during this discovery period allows you to renegotiate the project's schedule, scope and/or resources as you discover more of what you did not know.

Task Priority

Tasks are often assigned a priority, which sounds straightforward enough. A high-priority task is more important than a low-priority task, right? Except that is not always the case. Tasks can be assessed on different scales, the two most important being how urgent it is that the task be completed and how valuable or impactful the task actually is. This is a critical distinction, as a common issue in project teams is getting caught up in urgent but ultimately low-value tasks.

To keep this mental model top of mind, when you use the task management features of Clarity Forge, you don't set a priority directly; you set the urgency and value of the task. The priority is then calculated using a combination of those two factors, with a bit of extra weight given to the value.

When planning your project, be critical about which tasks have the most inherit value and try to schedule those first. This will help you avoid getting bogged down in urgent but low-value tasks.

Resource Availability

Resource availability is another vital element in task prioritisation. Team members might be involved in multiple projects or have other obligations, like performance reviews. Consider upcoming milestones or events that may take stakeholders away from your project, such as holidays or vacations. Incorporating all these aspects into your planning can help avoid scheduling issues later on.

Stakeholder and User Feedback

As frustrating as it may be to take time away from "actual work", it is critical that you keep your stakeholders well-informed. Think about how you can deliver on the project in a way that they can see and recognize tangible progress. Similarly, it is often important to gather feedback along the way from your users. Are you delivering tasks in a way that allows users to see how it all comes together and provide you with useful, constructive feedback?

Task Estimates

All of this will fall apart quickly if your task estimates are too far off. To imrove your estimates, take the time to break down large tasks into smaller pieces. As a rule of thumb, any task that will take more than eight hours should be broken down into subtasks. This process also helps to identify both hidden risks and ambiguities within tasks.

Putting It All Together

There are many variables to consider when building your plan, so start with those that are foundational and hard to change (e.g. resource availability and dependencies). Next, optimize for high-risk and high-value tasks. Finally, integrate everything with thoughtful checkpoints for your users and stakeholders.

After you have prioritized your tasks, revisit this prioritization regularly to accommodate changes to milestones, dependencies and any other new information that comes to light.

Finally, don't underestimate your intuition as a project manager. After gathering data and insights, sometimes your instincts can be quite helpful in guiding your decisions about priorities.

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