Moscow - but as prioritisation rather than destination. As time is a constraint, and we all know there is always more work we could do, somehow we need to prioritise what we are doing....
Must Should Could Won't (now)
How we prioritise things consists of two elements - how important something is, and how urgent it is - MoSCoW gives us the "how important" part of this. It doesn't mean that only the "Musts" get done. But there are only a certain number of "Musts" that can be done at any time, and not everything can be a Must.
So the other part of the equation is how urgent an item is - urgency alone is not a reason to do something (see the urgent/important matrix for more on this). But if we only ever have time to do the urgent things, over time everything becomes urgent.
In reality we end up with a mix of things, like the story about how you fill a jar. You can see the "stones" as being the larger things you need to do, or as the "Must" items that go in first. And then you fill in with the pebbles, sand, water in turn.
It is often difficult to get a clear decision on what is a Must. For things like help desk calls we can define a set of criteria - for example that a "priority 1" is when a complete service is unavailable. This doesn't necessarily mean it is a "big" thing - in a previous job we had a printer down. It was initially treated as a low priority as hey, its just a single printer. But it quickly emerged that the failed printer was located in the factory and was used for printing the despatch notes as things went out of the factory. No despatch notes meant nothing leaving the factory !! That's a priority one. Having a set of clear criteria in terms of the impact something has allows the priority decision to be consistent rather than "who yells loudest". After all, as the saying goes
"A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part"
(I can't find a reference for that quote as it is so often repeated)
When we do hit a crisis the focus is always on resolving that crisis first, and sometimes the step of working out why the crisis came about never gets done. Without that root cause analysis, how do we prevent the crisis happening again ? Another quote, which may be from Pat Parelli but he does have a habit of quoting other people
"what happened before what happened happened ?"
In my day to day work there are often deadlines that we are working to - dates for submission of papers, dates when a project task needs to be done. As that date approaches, there is a need to know "are we there yet ?". Fairly often it is only as we reach the wire that the message comes across "no, net yet". But like any journey, if we know the route and the expected timings along that route, often we have an idea we are at risk of not being there on time well before hand.
A few times recently I've had reason to say "in reality didn't you know this situation 3 weeks ago ?" because there was something due to happen at that point that didn't. And the subsequent leadtimes and steps after that mean that if things were late 3 weeks ago, it was extremely unlikely that the end point could be achieved on time. If they hadn't caught up two weeks ago, then you start to be asking for heroics. And if they hadn't caught up by a week ago, we're talking miracles.
What stops people saying "I'm not sure we're going to make it ?" Is it a triumph of hope over experience ? Is it that we really don't like to admit we can't do something ? Is our work culture unsupportive of saying "it's not going to happen" ?
Hw do we fix that so that if we have something that is urgent and important, the right questions are asked to get it back on track ? And if it is not so urgent, so an open and honest conversation can happen to work out and agree a new and realistic plan
No comments:
Post a Comment