How do you balance urgency versus importance in stakeholder requests?

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Given a bunch of tasks, I try to come up with an objective framework where I
know  for each task

* the level of effort/ time

* business impact

* Risk

* due date

* blocking status

ideally I'd tackle the high risk X due soon to prevent any failures first while
trying to progress on the high business impact X complex ones that I’d have
broken down into checkpoints (typically multi-step with multiple check-points)
while deprioritizing tasks that are low impact that are not blocking others.

With blocking tasks, my approach is to recognize tasks that can be operational /
repeated and for those come up with self-serve frameworks that XFN and others
can use to triage so my availabillity is not a blocker the idea is to encode our
knowledge/skills/processes in templates / AI tools while ensuring quality.

An example for the latter is a common MO for a new project is at the post
experimentation phase, here we have some operational tasks - read out docs,
segmentations, quality checks etc, I try to operationalize these during the
initial experiment iterations coming up with a template per project that is then
run for each experiment and maintained, that way any effort is incremental not
repetitive and frees up time and energy to focus on more critical items

Also I mentioned this but communication is key. When I know something will slip,
I communicate it early rather than waiting until the deadline. I try to be very
explicit about three things: what constraint changed, what the impact of the
delay is, and what options we have. For example, can we reduce scope and still
hit the original date, move the full deliverable out, or reprioritize another
commitment? I want the stakeholder to participate in the tradeoff rather than
just hear that something is delayed.

Early on in my career I’d be afraid to say no to things, but I really quickly
learnt that being stretched too thin and being unable to deliver on anything is
a far worse outcome. We need to be honest about availability and ruthlessly
prioritise. It’s also important to acknowledge that things can change a lot so
its important to be flexible and change priorities when the situation calls for
it

How do you balance urgency versus importance in stakeholder requests?

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