Here’s a cool piece of trivia you can share at your next dinner party: the word ‘priorities’ was pretty much non-existent until the 20th century. Before then, people would speak about ‘priority’.
Imagine that! One priority: a singular, most important activity that gets all your attention while everything else can wait.
Do you feel the serenity washing over you? 🌈
Now, let’s leave this ideal world and return to the one you live in ⛈️ It’s a world where, at any given moment, you’re balancing capacity for several projects that different stakeholders deem ‘The Priority’. And of course, if you get any of it wrong, you risk a burned-out team, stalled projects, and unhappy clients.
It’s not just you: prioritization is hard
When she recently joined us for a live session about capacity planning, Jacquie Ford, a Creative Ops leader who can list News Corp, Meta, and Canva on her resume, shared that her most pressing capacity management challenge is “trying to work out the most fair prioritization framework.”
The challenge of fairness comes up often for resource and capacity managers. You’re juggling multiple stakeholder demands and organizational priorities while simultaneously being in charge of your teams’ most precious asset: their time.
During the same session, Justin Watt, former Creative Ops leader at Metalab and current Co-Founder of Switchboard, also rated fair prioritization as his biggest resource management struggle:
“Everyone’s priorities are the highest, and there are only so many ‘bums in seats’. I think the most challenging thing is balancing the human needs with the business ones.”
Looks like we’re all in agreement that fair prioritization is hard. But what can we really do about it?
How to prioritize fairly
The most upvoted audience question for Ford and Watt during our live session was a spicy one about—you guessed it—prioritization:
Product Managers keep playing politics for allocations and changing their minds about project needs weekly, and we only have so many people. How can I fix this?
You can watch the segment where Ford and Watt tackled the question right here:
Sound familiar? If your answer is HELL YES, here are some options:
🛠️ Try these fixes
Ford recommends three solutions:
- Model different scenarios: scenario planning enables you to show stakeholders where your team’s time will be going rather than just tell them
- Consider a fixed sprint schedule: commit to a specific planning timeframe to avoid context switching and prevent last-minute changes to agreed-upon plans
- Revisit your prioritization framework: if you have one, make sure everyone is aligned and on board; if you don’t, start looking for one asap—Ford says it could be as simple as RICE or ICE
💬 Ask these questions
Borrow the questions Emily Feliciano, Atlassian’s Senior Global Creative Resource Manager, asks to prioritize incoming work:
- Are we mending a broken relationship with a client we want to salvage?
- Is this a new opportunity to partner with a client we’ve been seeking for a long time?
- What is the level of importance of getting this work accomplished?
- Is there flexibility in the timeline for us to deliver?
- Is there a large budget attached?
(If you like what you see, don’t miss out on more of Feliciano’s expert takes from our live event on project estimation.)
🧑🤝🧑 Involve your team
Managing priorities across multiple projects shouldn’t be up to you and you alone. Work with your team to set up a capacity management system that’s visible to everyone.
When your team realizes just how much there is to consider when prioritizing work, they can support you in the same way you support them.
It’s only... fair 😉
We couldn’t have done this piece without:
