Conflicting Priorities

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.
—John Carmack

Imagine a room of forty-one IT Operations engineers working for a successful gaming company. They are smart. They are engaged. They are well paid. On occasion, Nerf gun darts zoom across the room. All appears to be thriving. Except that when you stand back and observe the room a bit longer, you notice things that don’t look right.

The team’s poorly attended stand-ups (a fifteen-minute meeting where team members check in with each other to discuss what’s preventing them from moving forward) held every day, include more foot shuffling than discussion. The VP of Operations jokes half-heartedly about another trip to the CEO’s office as if he were being called to see the Principal. People wearing anxious expressions frequently approach the two project managers’ area. The anxious people are business product owners who want status updates on their projects. It turns out the only way they can get visibility on their projects is through the project managers, but the two managers are busy planning capacity and procuring hardware. That list is jotted down on sticky notes and in notepads and on calendar tasks—in other words, it is spread out over many different list-making tools.

The project managers facilitate a daily stand-up in front of a seventy-two-inch plasma screen mounted on the wall. Seeking clarity, they open the floor to the Operations team, asking them to identify blocked work and other issues preventing them from finishing tasks. The project managers’ hope is that they will be able to help remove project impediments and provide accurate status updates to the product owners. But when the project managers ask the Operations engineers if anyone is blocked, the Ops people return blank stares and silence, because they don’t want to point fingers or get a team member in trouble. The issues causing the blockages are invisible to the project managers.

This is a familiar scene on any given day at organizations where stand-ups go wrong. The engineers are trying to get clarity on priorities from the project managers, and the project managers are trying to get clarity on statuses from the Operations engineers. In both cases, the common denominator is unclear priorities. Invisible work and invisible priorities hamper the alignment needed among engineers, project managers, and business people to make effective progress. Again, it all comes back to the necessity of making work visible for everyone.

However, for many, there is confusion on what real progress looks like. A team of engineers who look really busy but who are not completing project features are a red flag. Having a bunch of projects that are sitting at 90% complete does the company no good. Sales can’t sell a feature to a customer if the customer cannot access the feature; features are only valuable if customers can use them.

Going back to the same daily stand-up, in the top left-hand corner of the plasma screen is a list of the Operations team’s top four priorities: capacity expansion, disaster recovery, security, and site reliability. The assumption is that, given these priorities, the team can prioritize their own work.

Of the thirty-three projects that this team of forty-one engineers is working on, more than half of them are identified as priority one. Yet, no one is willing to point out that the team is being asked to do too many projects at one time. And no one is paying attention to the metrics that show just how long work is sitting queued up, waiting for someone to become available to do the work. The careless implication is that all the projects must get done now. The team believes they are doing everything in their power to get all the work done, yet many of the thirty-three projects remain incomplete, and new projects are started before existing projects are finished.

We’ve all encountered situations like this in varying contexts: group projects in middle school in which no one yet knows how to prioritize, unreasonable deadlines set by managers who want all the work done “yesterday,” and/or trying to multitask through your to-do list by tackling everything at once instead of accomplishing tasks by level of value.

The negative impact of copious untracked dependencies, lengthy cycle times, and habitual overtime is invisible in the short term. Eventually, though, network errors, security oversights, and missed delivery dates become uncomfortably visible. What’s not happening here is the acknowledgment that some of these projects should be set aside until the teams have capacity.

Thief Conflicting Priorities cackles with delight when people are uncertain or disagree on what to work on.

Say a team was working on a report that took ages to complete. Not only did it take a long time, but it was also delivered six months later than leadership wanted. Let’s say we examined the team’s workload, and it turns out they had thirteen initiatives, which was more than the number of people they had on the whole team. Furthermore, their priority meetings took longer than an hour and happened every week. If we reduce this team’s initiatives to, say, seven, they now have better focus and their priority meetings are shorter. Reducing the volume of WIP helps people prioritize more effectively because there are fewer things vying for attention. Lest we forget that Thief Too Much WIP is the ringleader of all the thieves, one cause of too much WIP is the failure to prioritize properly.

If people can’t prioritize effectively, they try to do too much at once and everything takes longer. Then, too much WIP equals longer cycle times, which leads to delays in delivering value to customers. Happy customers (whether internal or external) brighten our day and our pocketbooks. Longer cycle times delay the opportunity to receive vital feedback from customers about our work, which in turn creates a crevice for more thievery to sneak in.

If everything is priority one, then nothing is a priority one, and everything takes too long. As Ross Garber says, “Many things may be important, but only one can be the most important.”1 It could be that the greatest value for the business today would be for you to go help someone else finish something instead of starting something new.

You know that Thief Conflicting Priorities is stealing time from you when you hear people ask/say:

Another indicator conflicting priorities are bogging down your work is when you find yourself spending countless hours in meetings discussing priorities. Thief Conflicting Priorities is a close cousin of Thief Unplanned Work. And just like unplanned work, heaps of older, planned work pile up when priorities conflict. When today’s highest priority work supersedes yesterday’s highest priority work, look to the ringleader Thief Too Much WIP as the core problem. Teams will fall behind on planned responsibilities unless they keep stepping up.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

There is one most important thing—let people know what it is.
Conflicting priorities occur when people are uncertain on what the highest priority is. This leads to too much WIP, which leads to longer cycle times.
Conflicting priorities that compete for the same people and resources block flow and increase partially completed work.
What we see as a priority frequently clashes with what others see as a priority.