Knowing the top causes that complicate project activity prioritization—as well as the activities further down the list—is crucial for project success. Establishing clear priorities enables participants to direct resources effectively, to minimize delays between activity handoffs and transitions, and to be sure they’re working on the right things at the right times.
But sometimes project teams encounter challenges prioritizing tasks and it may not be completely clear which activities are most important. Whether due to ambiguous project objectives or a lack of concrete information, project professionals can’t always be confident their priorities are accurate and up to date.
If you’re experiencing difficulties with project activity prioritization, consider if one of these five elements is complicating your efforts.
1 – Fuzzy project objectives
If your project’s sponsors haven’t developed sufficient clarity around the project’s objectives, it will be challenging to prioritize the initiative’s activities effectively. Your team may struggle to evaluate which tasks are core to project success and which are less critical. It will also likely be difficult to establish meaningful metrics to measure performance. Simply communicating priorities to your team members and other stakeholders will be a problem if things are still up in the air, which means you won’t be able to gain the necessary alignment to plan and execute the right actions.
2 – Insufficient information
Incomplete or inadequate information about project requirements, constraints, and dependencies can make it difficult to prioritize activities effectively. Without all the necessary data about how different activities relate to each other, for example, you can’t accurately build and assess task sequences. Similarly, a lack of information about resource requirements will hinder efforts to determine how to allocate resources or identify potential resource constraints. You’re also likely to overlook or underestimate risks if you don’t have sufficient data about where the project’s priorities land.
3 – Shifting resource allocations
Assigning resources and monitoring consumption within the scope of a single project is one thing, but if resource availability changes at the organizational level, you may find it difficult to effectively prioritize project activities. Several factors can affect resource allocations for a project, including the loss of a large customer account, early termination of a lucrative contract, unexpected changes in the market, and funding delays. When resources previously assumed to be available are suddenly no longer at the project team’s disposal, it may come down to making difficult trade-offs between equally important activities.
4 – Stakeholder conflicts
If project stakeholders can’t come to a consensus about priorities and demands, the resulting conflicts could create difficulties in determining the priority of project activities. Competing interests are sometimes behind these stakeholder disagreements, and power dynamics can also complicate efforts to bring all parties into alignment. Where different timeline expectations and urgency levels exist, the project team may not have enough clarity to sequence activities in an order that suits everyone. Even when an agreement is finally reached, the time lost can make prioritizing against an abbreviated schedule exponentially more difficult.
5 – Changing business priorities
Projects with long durations are particularly at risk of prioritization challenges. This is because the firm’s circumstances—and therefore its needs—may change as time passes. New competitors could take away valuable market share or upset long-standing customer expectations and preferences, or financial pressures could create unanticipated problems or opportunities. Though reprioritizing may be necessary, it isn’t always immediately clear how the new circumstances will ultimately affect the project’s activities, schedule, and resource needs. Task sequences might be updated several times before the revised plan is finalized, and established priorities could undergo many modifications before everyone agrees on what’s most important.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.