Dr Craig Dent

A new project is announced. It is important, time-sensitive and has the support of senior management. Everyone is asked to give it their attention.

The existing projects remain. So do the reporting deadlines, the unresolved problems and the everyday work that keeps the organisation functioning.

Nothing has been removed. Something else has been added.

This is a familiar management problem. Each request may be reasonable when considered on its own. The difficulty emerges when the same people are expected to deliver all of them within the same working week.

At some point, someone has to decide what waits.

If management does not make that decision, employees will make it themselves, often without the authority or information needed to understand the consequences.

I think this is where the responsibility for setting priorities deserves closer attention. Identifying something as important is relatively easy. Deciding what should receive less attention as a result is considerably harder.

Consider a hypothetical team introducing a new customer service system. Staff are expected to attend training, test the system and help prepare for its launch. They must also maintain existing service levels, clear a backlog and complete their normal reporting.

All of these activities have a purpose. None becomes unnecessary simply because the new system is being introduced.

But the time required to do them has to come from somewhere.

Perhaps customers wait longer. Perhaps testing is rushed. Perhaps staff work additional hours, or a manager quietly postpones something that another part of the organisation is relying upon.

The organisation may continue to describe every commitment as achievable because the compromises have not yet appeared in a report. They are being made in daily decisions about which call to return, which task to leave unfinished and which problem can wait until tomorrow.

This is one reason why asking people to manage their time better can be an inadequate response. Time management has value, but it cannot resolve an ongoing mismatch between the work assigned and the capacity available to complete it.

That requires a management decision.

The manager needs to understand what the new commitment will involve, who will carry it and what those people are already expected to deliver. That understanding must include work that is easily overlooked: helping colleagues, resolving exceptions, correcting errors and dealing with the unexpected.

A plan that allocates every available hour to scheduled tasks leaves little room for how organisations actually operate.

There are choices available. Work can be deferred. A project can be reduced in scope. Resources can be reassigned. A deadline can be negotiated. An activity that no longer serves a useful purpose can be stopped.

Each choice carries consequences. Deferring work may disappoint a stakeholder. Reducing scope may mean accepting a more modest result. Adding resources may require expenditure that someone must justify.

Making those consequences explicit is part of the job.

Managers will not always have the authority to change a deadline or secure additional people. They do, however, have a responsibility to explain what can reasonably be delivered and to seek a decision when expectations exceed capacity. Passing an unresolved conflict down to the team leaves the problem intact.

There is also a leadership question here. What happens when someone says that the work cannot all be completed as promised?

If that response is treated as a lack of commitment, people learn to agree in meetings and make adjustments quietly afterwards. Management then loses access to information it needs. The apparent agreement conceals different assumptions about what will actually happen.

People should be able to explain a constraint without having to prove their loyalty first. A manager who listens carefully can distinguish between a problem that needs assistance, an expectation that needs clarification and a commitment that needs to change.

Of course, organisations face periods when several demands genuinely are urgent. An operational failure, an unexpected absence or a fixed external deadline may require a temporary increase in effort. Priorities cannot remove every pressure, and judgement remains necessary.

The difficulty arises when temporary pressure becomes the ordinary way of working. If delivery repeatedly depends on people extending their hours or leaving other responsibilities unattended, that should prompt an examination of the plan.

It should also prompt a conversation about what the organisation is prepared to stop doing.

Stopping work can be uncomfortable. Someone proposed it, approved it or invested considerable effort in it. Yet continuing an activity also consumes resources. Earlier commitment alone cannot establish that it should take precedence over everything that has emerged since.

Priorities need to be revisited as circumstances change, and the resulting decisions need to be communicated. People should know what has moved, why it has moved and how their work is affected.

A useful test is whether a team can explain what should happen when two important demands compete. Do people know which takes precedence? Do they know who can resolve the conflict? Can they raise the issue before a commitment is missed?

Those are practical signs that priorities have been established.

Management involves making choices that others can act upon. When everything remains a priority, those choices are still waiting to be made.