Prioritizing projects and work requests

Did you say “prioritize” ? There is that word again !!!

Some clients have the greatest difficulty with this concept. Prioritizing the work has as much to do with your success as an IT manager as other management skills. No IT organization can work on every issue that comes up at once. Failing to prioritize will certainly spell doom sooner or later.

How do you prioritize ?

You should involve your primary clients that are giving you the requests. It develops more of a partnership and has them involved in achieving their desired results. Plus, the IT department is not necessarily in the best seat to make the determination of which project is most important.

Prioritizing programming projects must take several factors into consideration including need, reasons for the change, implications of making and not making the change, cost, resource effort, status of other projects, resource expertise availability, etc.

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It’s usually harder to decide what you don’t work on than it is to decide what to work on. Just remember that a key to delivering IT services viewed as consistent with company needs has a lot to do with requiring your client to help you

prioritize your projects. To do that you have to help the client understand your capacity for getting things done and that doing it right the first time saves time and money.

A general rule of thumb that you can use to help you prioritize requests would be to look at each priority in the following rank of importance:

A. Affects cash flow B. Business compliance C. Client retention D. Increases revenue E. Increases productivity F. Enhances client satisfaction

As you see, the first three have to do with current business operation needs – maintaining cash flow, keeping your clients and staying in business. The next two items are issues that improves the business, and the last includes items that make the client/user feel better but may not do very much for the business.

The ‘meat and potatoes’ of managing programming priorities are in the first 4 areas so make them your priorities as you look at each request.

Another way to help your client or user better understand the need to help prioritize a programming backlog is to put an hourly programming rate on each project. If two projects are estimates of 100 hours each and the client knows that the cost is $50 per hour (use whatever number you want), then he can get to a decision quickly as to which project he wants to pay $5,000 for.

Internal clients, especially, don’t look at the true cost of your programming projects. Help them understand it and they will help you prioritize appropriately.

When you work on your client’s true priorities you are well on your way toward a great client relationship.

A tool that helps you and your client to prioritize the backlog of requests is to maintain a Backlog Report. Tools are readily available to log and maintain backlog requests, assign them to IT resources, etc. You can also develop one in Microsoft Access with minimal effort.

For this exercise, I’ll use an EXCEL spreadsheet sample that can work for you as well.

Having a Backlog Report gives you a quick visual on how much there is to do, or at least how much has been requested. It can also tell you where the requests are coming from. It can do a lot for you if you set it up right; and, it doesn’t take a lot of effort.

The Projects included are only the projects that have not yet been completed. You may have a project on the list for a year or more. If it never becomes a priority it will stay unless you reach an agreement with the requestor to eliminate it.

The Priority is Low, Medium, or High. To highlight the high priorities you can shade the appropriate blocks. One assumption that you may have to work on is that it would seem obvious that your programmers should work on the High priorities first. Not necessarily.

Because you may have multiple clients providing requests, they won’t all have the same priority. Developing measures to manage the prioritization activities to fit your programming capacity can be a challenge but achievable. If you have to, form a user committee that reviews the backlog and assigns priorities with you that fits within your programming capacity.

Requested by is the department requesting the change.

Expected start and end dates are added when the project is actually assigned to a programmer and a finished estimate date is put in to target when you expect the project to be placed into production.

Adding the Assigned Programming Resource column lets you see what your programmers are working on. It also is a good reference for looking at assigned projects when you begin tracking the quality of your programming releases (more on that later).

IT Project Backlog

( Date ) Assigned

Req. Expected Prog. Est.

PROJECT PRI By Start End Resource Hours Comments

4. Project # 4 M Dept-A 5/1/01 6/1/01 Ray 30

6. Project # 6 L Dept-B 5/1/01 6/1/01 Ray 10

10. Project # 6 H Dept-A 3/20/01 6/1/01 Bob 150

11. Project # 11 H Dept-A 3/29/01 6/15/01 Ken 100 28. Project # 28 M Client1 5/31/01 6/30/01 Ray 20

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Estimated Hours lets you see how the projects are assigned and relative balance among your programming staff. In the past I have even used a total actual hours column to compare the actual time of effort compared to the estimate to improve our ability to forecast work efforts.

When the user can look at the outstanding list of backlog items and estimated hours that his department has requested, it makes it easier for to prioritize.

Anything you can do that helps you make it easier for the client and gives you awareness of your business is a good thing to do.

My management approach has always been to use reports like this to conduct weekly or monthly status meetings with the IT staff and to host prioritization meetings with clients.

EXCEL has certain limitations obviously, but it’s a quick startup if nothing is available and each column can be sorted quickly to allow review of the dynamics of your programming organization. It’s also easy enough to transfer completed projects to another spreadsheet for basic historical reporting.

I’m a strong proponent that you don’t really need the software tool that provides you every feature you can think of. In reality, you will probably only use a few key features to manage your business very effectively.