Separating the important from the urgent
At any given point there is only one most important thing you should be doing.
Sadly, that seldom coincides with the most urgent.
A solution to that is to carve a space dedicated to the important rather than the urgent.
At Recovr we realized a few months ago that we were consumed by the urgent.
Our solution has been to optimize for the flow of our main priority. We decide on a main priority when the previous one is done, and there is one person responsible for its continuous flow.
This has allowed us three things:
1- the most important feature is always visible and prioritized.
2- the most important feature is in constant movement.
3- we have (surprisingly?) more space for the urgent.
These don't just happen by magic, but rather a combination of factors:
The visibility of the advance of the main priority ‘buys’ a lot of goodwill from the rest of the teams.
Since the people that are not on the main priority can be interrupted, it's easier to tackle ad hoc emergencies
The people working on the main priority fluctuate, this allows us to expand or contract capacity for ‘non main priority’ work.
Our rules for the main priority are quite simple:
A main priority must have a DoR (Définition if Ready) with at least a MoSCoW priorisation.
There is one person responsible for the main priority, and they can ‘recruit’ anyone from the team they need to make the priority move forward.
The main priority takes precedence above other things, it cannot remain sitting in a queue.
The person responsible decides how the work is shared/performed and communicates with the rest of the company.
We have noticed that the other teams are quite happy with this arrangement as it increases both flexibility to tackle urgent things and visibility on our next most important feature.
If you are drowning in urgent things, and have trouble advancing important work, I recommend you to try and set up a main priority.
