How to Prioritize Projects

   A question raised the other day when I gave a presentation to a room full of business owners was “How Do We Prioritize Projects?”  Now, that is an interesting question– however, the answer is not as complicated as it may seem!
    Step 1 is to identify and list all of the projects.  Don’t worry about order, just list them.
    Step 2 is to identify those projects that will fulfill certain goals that you are trying to achieve.  If you are trying to clean up the store, office, shop, etc., then all the projects that are related to order and cleanliness count for A level projects.  Any project or task not associated with order or cleanliness is identified, with B, C, D, etc.
     Step 3 is to combine all like type projects which have distinct, discrete letters.  For example, if you have paint the shop wall as J, and paint the office wall as M, actually you have shop wall as J1 and Office Wall as J2.  What you will find is that there will become a natural grouping of projects once they are all listed and identified.
     Step 4 is to begin accomplishing each task or set of tasks depending on their relative importance to your or your organization.
     What becomes apparent rapidly is that many previously identified discrete tasks are now grouped together.  Here, you find that where you once had many individual tasks, you now have a smaller set of like tasks.  This makes doing the whole project easier.
     There is no right or wrong way in which to do task prioritization.  The key point is to know what is important for you, your organization and then list the tasks.  The priorities will easily “jump out” as to which is first, second, etc.