Ruthless Prioritisation - A Key Ingredient Of High-Performing Teams

We’ve all been there: overwhelming backlogs, demanding stakeholders, and deadlines that keep getting closer. It doesn’t feel great, but how you prioritise can stop it happening or help you escape.

Capacity: The Unavoidable Constraint

Capacity - the amount that something can produce.

People, time, and attention are finite; even in the brave new AI powered world. Capacity sets the limit for what a team can deliver. No team or organisation can escape the limits of time and human energy. Trying will lead to overworked people, projects failing because of scope creep, etc.; not affordances of a high performing team.

The Illusion of More Capacity

Whilst capacity might be finite, we can get more capacity. Surely more is better - right?

Fred Brooks wrote The Mythical Man-Month in 1975, and 50 years later, the central thesis of adding more people to a delayed project will delay it further is still true. Adding people may increase your capacity, but it comes at a cost. New people need onboarding, need time to get up to speed, and increase the coordination overhead.

Why can’t people work longer? For short bursts they could, but sustained overwork will lead to burnout. Which is compounded if the mission and purpose of what they’re doing is unclear, or worse, non-existent.

But, it’s ok, because company ABC is selling a tool that fixes all these problems. Call me cynical, but I’m yet to see such a tool. Adding or changing tools to increase capacity may work; but don’t expect it to be instant, people and organisations will have to adjust how they approach their work to see the benefits. (Side point - this is one explanation for why AI tooling hasn’t increased productivity, yet - we need time to learn how to leverage it.)

One Effective Strategy: Ruthless Prioritisation

Prioritisation - The process of assigning priorities to things or tasks

Whilst your capacity might be fixed, you can control what gets worked on. You need to drive the focus towards what delivers the most value; not what’s most urgent nor what the loudest person is asking for.

It doesn’t matter what framework you adopt (MoSCoW, RICE, etc.), the important aspect is aligning everyone on how that framework denotes the value. The business the team is in and their context will change what value means for them. For example, it could be on revenue, or retention, or performance, etc.

But you need a set of things to prioritise, with each thing a similar size. Trying to prioritise a 12 month migration project against an effort to improve query performance is impossible. They are not comparable. But splitting that big migration project up into smaller chunks opens up the ability to decide how to prioritise them against each other. It’s important that each chunk delivers value; this is not just about decomposing work but thinking in terms of releasable value. It adds adaptability into the whole process; maybe we realise part way through the migration that completing it is lower value than other work. This allows the team and stakeholders to be clear on the value, get faster feedback, and reduce risk.

Digital tools are both a blessing and a curse. They enablea you to create and manage a shareable and consumable backlog, but they also allow it to grow infinitely large. Having too many things to prioritise amongst can be both frustrating and time consuming. More things will steal more of your time and attention. Don’t be afraid to delete work from your backlog; if it’s valuable then someone else will ask for it.

None of this is new, agile and lean methodologies have long preached incremental delivery. The one thing they don’t make clear is how you get to that point - ruthless prioritisation.

And one big bonus; hopefully, the value you deliver is measurable and so the impact of your team is too.

Tying It Back to Lean Methods

Inspired by Toyota’s Production System lean methodologies for software delivery arose; trying to apply the learnings from manufacturing. They focus on eliminating waste, improving flow, and delivering value continuously. Ruthless prioritisation reduces waste because waste doesn’t enter the system and low-value tasks never get prioritised. And that ruthless prioritisation helps to improve the flow because you’ve already made the batches of work smaller; and smaller batches move faster. The net result being that the effort used to ruthlessly prioritise the work led to less waste, faster flow, and most importantly more value delivered.

No Prioritization? No Case for More Capacity

You still think you need more people? Great, you now have a well prioritised backlog with a clear value story; and you know the value delivered. If you are missing either of these then your request for either more people or more time will lack credibility. If you have both priorities and measurable outcomes, then you can be clear on the impact of the requests’ approval or denial. But remember, no increase comes for free.

Conclusion

Whilst capacity is fixed, value delivery is not. You need to make sure your team is always focussed on the most valuable work. So start prioritising ruthlessly!