Prioritizing Projects and Tasks

Project Prioritization

What should we work on next?

Are there any lean six sigma tools or methods that make it easier to analyze, prioritize, and choose between potential projects?

Project Prioritization Matrix

We started to develop a new tool for project prioritization, and then realized that there were already several existing tools that were ideal for the job.

So rather than inventing a new tool, we made a few minor improvements to some existing tools, and then published a new training page for how to do Project Prioritization.

Project Prioritization

By far the most popular approach is to assess the potential Impact and Effort of each proposed project.

In other words...

1. In what ways and to what extent do we anticipate that this project will advance our desired Strategic Goals and Objectives?
2. How much time, cost, and effort do we think this might require?

And then there are a few additional things to factor into good decision making... like:

• Leadership enthusiasm
• Team availability
• Process stability
• and a few more important factors

Big Decisions

By far the most thorough approach is to use your Prioritization Matrix template.

You might only use this tool once in your entire career, but you would use it to facilitate the single most important decision making team that you ever lead.

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Task Prioritization

What should we work on next?

Once you have selected and prioritized your lean six sigma projects, you now need to manage them.

Or training page for
Project Management Tools
has links to dozens of helpful tools.

Project Management Tools

In this newsletter, let's focus on two:

1. The Eisenhower Matrix
2. Workflow Management

Eisenhower Matrix

Past U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and author Stephen Covey popularized the task prioritization based on the criteria of Importance and Urgency.

Your To Do List template has 2 new columns for 'Important' and 'Urgent'.

As a visual cue to help you prioritize tasks...

the background color of the cells in both columns turn colors based on whether your rating for that task is greater than or equal to the Color Level Thresholds.

1. Pink = Both Important and Urgent
2. Green = Important not Urgent
3. Yellow = Urgent not Important

Download the latest trial, and try it for yourself.

Notice that you can change your color level thresholds at any time... making it really easy to increase or decrease the number of tasks that get highlighted.

Important Features

Unlike simplistic Eisenhower templates that we have seen, notice that:

1. Your tasks can be grouped and organized with related sub-tasks

   rather than limiting you to only one row per task

2. You make final decisions for Priority

   You can apply your human intelligence to possibly consider additional factors when making your task prioritization decisions

   rather than relying on a simplistic algorithm that considers only 2 factors

Learn more about Task Prioritization

Workflow Management

For complex projects that involve lots of people in lots of different teams and departments...

Excel simply isn't the right tool to plan, manage, and track the current status of those types of projects.

For those types of projects, you should invest in some form of cloud based workflow management application.

KPI-Fire

Recently, Systems2win worked with the software engineers at KPI-Fire, to make it as easy as possible to integrate your cloud based workflows with the Excel templates that are relevant for each step of each phase of your project.

For example, you might have a Hoshin Planning workflow that has links to the appropriate Excel templates that are useful for each stage of strategic planning.

Or you might have a workflow for DMAIC problem solving with links to your Problem Solving templates.

Once the team leader uses a blank template as the starting point for a new working document... then the workflow software also has a link to that working document... along with features to track the completion status of that document, and who needs to work on it next, and other features that are the strength of cloud based applications to track and manage complex workflows.

So you have the best of both worlds...

1. Your familiar, consistent, standardized Systems2win templates
   (with online training)
2. Cloud based project management software, with your own personalized workflows,
   to suggest using the right tools at the right times for 'what's needed next?'

Learn more about KPI-Fire

Even if you already own a license,
you can download the latest trials any time,

including the recently updated To Do List, the new Root Cause Analysis Map, the TWI Job Breakdown Sheet, and the Layout Diagram for spaghetti mapping.