Ranking, Categorising, Prioritising

Last week’s freebie generated some curiosity, so I thought why not extend the idea this week – let’s build on that concept of visibility and take the next step. Once you can *see* the work on your plate, the next step is to get absolute clarity on what’s important. All too often we talk about “high priority” or “P1, 2, 3” items – but the reality is, all we’re doing is *categorizing* work. What we want to get to is a force-ranked list of what’s important. Struggle street? No doubt. But you should also know that if you’re not making these calls at an executive level, these decisions are still happening – they’re just happening at the coal face, where one poor person is choosing between multiple squeaky wheels – and worse than that, you have zero visibility of what those decisions are. Your projects run late, work slumps and slags, and your dreams of responsive, agile organization wane. So take that visibility you generated last week in illuminating your backlog, and extend the principle – Make your priority calls *clear* – force-rank that work In the process, you’ll have messy conversations, for sure, but you’ll also find you gain better visibility on the benefits and impact you’re aiming for with the work of the portfolio, your team builds shared understanding, and dependencies will become far more apparent.