Anonymous
Competing priorities come up regularly. The best approach I find is to be open and communicative about such situations with your leadership as well as your stake holders. We recently had a lay-off at XYZ which impacted our team. At the same time, there were new strategic initiatives kicking off. This meant less people, more work. My team of 4 became a team of 3 and we were brought in to support new projects. My team was excited to be part of new strategies taking shape but also had the burden of maintaining old projects. I wanted to give my team the opportunity to work on the new projects which were exciting but also prevent burn-out. I firstly talked to my leadership highlighting the volume of tasks and the unrealistic expectation on each person. My leadership was in agreement that some work had to be de-prioritized and asked me to come up with a proposal. Next I talked to my stakeholders for old and new tasks. When explaining the high load on my team, some of the old tasks were voluntarily de-prioritized by my business teams as they were also considering going a new direction and didn't necessarily need to maintain old solutions. Similarly some of the new projects could be time staggered to give my team time to close one and then take up another. What I learnt is honestly explaining the reasons why work might have to be delayed and still showing a genuine interest in collaborating helps get buy in and support from the otherwise demanding stakeholders. In this way, I was able to keep my stakeholders and my team happy and balanced.
