Prioritize That!

Whether you’re a project manager or a developer or a support engineer or you call it who you probably are asked quite often to estimate some work effort. You do your estimates, sometimes better sometimes worse and go with a number or better a couple of them. A person who was asking takes the number, if you gave two of them the higher one will be forgotten, and fades in shades of the office.

You forget the whole thing as it has never happened.

And then, after weeks of being processed by business processes, your estimate comes back to kick your ass.

“You said two weeks. I want to see that delivered in exactly 14 days from now. Bye.”

Hey, has anybody thought about other tasks I have to do? Or maybe I’m considered as a person who does virtually nothing, just waiting for a task to be assigned? That way I guess I should have been fired, shouldn’t I?

These are wrong answers. Don’t try that at work. But you can do what common sense tells you to do. Ask about priorities.

“Of course, that can be done in fortnight but other tasks will be dropped. If that one has the highest priority I’ll stop doing anything else and complete the new task as soon as possible.”

Ask for prioritizing the task. You’ll give yourself a chance to avoid being blamed for a slip. You’ll give better-informed people a chance to make a wise choice. You’ll make folks aware that resources aren’t made of gum and can’t be stretched as much as most of people think.

It works whether you manage just your own work time or you have a big team working concurrently on several projects.