As a project manager, part of your job is figuring out how to maximize the efficiency of your team. This involves making sure everyone is working on what’s most important right now, and they’re always up to date about changing priorities.

Many of us have more work than we can handle which makes questions like, “what’s most important right now?” and “what can wait?” difficult to answer. You might find yourself wondering:

• Should I always do work for the biggest client first?
• Does work assigned from one manager supersede work assigned from a different manager?
• What about the thing that’s due first?
• How do I prioritize work that will take the longest?

It’s tempting to say yes to every project,  thinking you can treat them all with equal importance, but you know what they say – when everything is priority, nothing is priority. 

Without structure to help your team focus on the most important work for your business at a given time, you’re bound to miss deadlines and find it difficult to manage client or stakeholders expectations. While you struggle to align everyone  toward consistent objectives, team members waste time on the wrong things.

With LiquidPlanner, you’re able to manage all your projects in a single portfolio  that builds your organization’s priorities into the schedule from the start. Planning Intelligence manages the complexity for you. Instead of calling meetings and generating reports, you can quickly forecast new timelines and consider multiple scenarios with a simple drag and drop. As you do that, the entire workspace immediately responds –  priorities shift, workload rebalances, and predictive scheduling calculates new dates so you can see the impact right away.

Want to see how it works inside LiquidPlanner? Check out this video:

How to Align Priorities Across Teams & Stakeholders

LiquidPlanner’s scheduling engine factors in your organization’s priorities from the start, so that everyone on the team can always see what is most important.

When looking at your scheduled work, prioritization is established by the top to bottom ordering of projects and tasks in your workspace. When a resource has assignments on these items, work that is closer to the top will be scheduled before work that is lower down. 

Changing the order will change the predicted scheduling of these projects for everyone involved.

Since the schedule is resource driven, work starts as soon as people are available to do it and projects run in parallel when they don’t share resources.  

The individual resources working on these projects have these priorities laid out for them in their personal Workload View. This makes it easy for everyone to stay on the same page about which work is up first and what will come later. 

If the idea of managing a prioritized list of work is still a bit new, a good place to get started is to first lay them out in the order of their Target Finish dates (deadlines in LiquidPlanner.) Target Finish dates drive alerts that show when it may be unrealistic to hit the goals you’ve set.

The impact of reprioritizing or adding new work in the schedule is shown immediately. This gives you the right information to have smart conversations about shifting the priorities of your organization’s work. 

Want to learn more? Check out our Academy for additional lessons and content. 

See you next time.