Prioritisation and the busyness trap (Part 1)

I just finished running the first event of a series called “You can’t fix culture”. Together with my colleagues at Neu21 we explore some of the common issues that contribute to “cultural problems” in organisations. The first one was about busyness and prioritisation. This is a two-part newsletter where I will share the main points I discuss with my colleague Sian Jones.

The way I think about busyness is at two levels: organisational level and personal / human level. Let’s explore first the organisational one, and next week we will explore the personal human one. What are the things that contribute to that busyness trap in organisations at a systematic level?

1. Budgeting and Business Planning

   Usually, organisations embark in budgeting and business planning once a year and usually 3 to 5 months before the end of the current financial year. This means you have all executives and head of departments running like headless chooks trying to “guess” how much money they are going to need and what projects they are going to deliver to achieve the targets they promise the CFO.
   
   As many of these executives don’t want to miss on potential money for next year, they keep adding initiatives and projects to justify all the money they are asking for. When you start adding up all these executives’ lists of projects; you end up with 100’s of projects that the company has promised will deliver next year. 
   
   Well…guess who is going to have to deliver all these projects? Yep, the same team you had that was already at capacity trying to deliver the same list that was created last year.

2. KPI’s

   The second systematic cause of busyness in organisations are a follow up from the previous point. Organisations once they have finished with that business and budgeting planning, usually start mapping those initiatives and projects to individual and team KPI’s
   
   So what happens then is that a manager or contributor’s end of year bonus depends on the success of a number of projects and initiatives that were decided usually 15 months ago. This approach eliminates the possibility of these managers actually having the freedom to say if a project is no longer required or useful to the organisation as their financial bonus is linked to it.
   
   These two systematic issues are the main reasons why projects and initiatives don’t get “killed” and the lists of things to do for people keeps getting longer and longer; contributing to everyone being “very busy” and trying to do too much.
    

So what is the solution?  

The solution is to think about business planning and KPI setting in a different way.  Rather than only planning once a year and trying to predict the next 15 months; design and implement a deliberate planning rhythm in the organisation of 90 days cycles. Sure, once a year get together and agree on the overall direction of the organisation; but don’t try to predict all the projects and initiatives you will deliver over 15 months. Break it down into manageable chunks.  
 
Prioritisation, at the end of the day, is just the art of making sure the right work is delivered by the right people at the right time. 
 
A process I use to help teams and organisations prioritise is to ask each team at the beginning of each 90 days cycle what are the initiatives we need to be working on during that period. And then and then ask ourselves:

• Does that initiative need to be done in that 90 days period or can it wait?

• Does that initiative need to be done/ discussed at that level / team or can it be done / discussed at a level below in the organisation?

That simple process usually reduces the work in progress in teams and if done properly across the entire business you get a beautiful lean portfolio management approach that reduces waste and busyness
 
The second thing is to make sure you don’t assign KPI’s to individuals for their projects as it prevents managers from saying the project is not needed anymore. I personally like KPI’s that are linked to the overall performance of the organisation; but more on KPI’s in another newsletter.
 
Next week I will be covering the personal / human causes that lead to the busyness in organisations.