The Organizational Discipline of Prioritization

I've had a lot of experience and discussions around prioritization of work with both internal and external customers.  I've also been on the delivery end working down a priority list.  The one refrain I've heard over and over from customers is very simple: "why should we have to?"

Giving priority is a biological imperative, and an organizational one.  It is required by scarcity, which all things deal with sooner or later.  Who gets food, who gets water - in nature the strongest or the cleverest receive priority. We recognize this as "natural selection."

However, in organizations, be it the cells of a body, a family, or a company, priority is given internal to the organization based on the system priorities.  A mother gives priority to children, so when food is short, the mother feeds them first.  When your body is cold, your extremities lose priority over the vital organs and your body diverts blood flow away from the limbs.  Systems like the human body prioritize constantly in hundreds of ways in order to keep balance and to keep health.

For any person who has a goal, they must constantly prioritize what opportunities that they take in order to reach their goals in life.  Every mentor I have ever had has explained that I need to choose the opportunities I take, even down to which chores that I do first in my house.  The people who never prioritize tend to be arrogant and spoiled, and when real life hits them they collapse under its weight.

This same thing applies to organizations and the work that they want done.  Organizations must prioritize in order to reach their goals.  It is a discipline, make no mistake, and it is not easy to do, and distributing the priorities of your organization so that what is truly important goes first.  I have experienced conflicting priorities because organizations units are pulling against each other and no one breaks the tie.  That sort of friction, if endemic, is a symptom of a greater organizational problem showing that the organization is not pulling together instead it is pulling apart.

  What can be done to prevent this?  Priority setting must be a habit.  The priorities must be set by the leadership and then transferred to the organization in language that each unit can understand - so that each member can follow those priorities.

Now, how does this affect work that comes to a service delivery manager?  It should follow that all work submitted follows the priorities of the organization, and that those requests are ordered to meet them.  The only way to ensure that is for work to arrive in a queue that is ordered to ensure that it is met.