A couple of years ago we were invited to visit a few companies in Silicon Valley to chat about what we were up to. It was a great trip and one of the perks was being taken to some fantastic seafood restaurants.
During one meal there was a long discussion about the problems companies have with project prioritisation in complex environments.
One humorous comment that stuck with me was, "I don't mind rolling the rock up the hill and getting near the top only to see it roll all the way back down again. It's rolling the rock up the hill, getting half way and having to just hold it steady that I can't stand - an occasional change of scenery would be good."
Working in IT, we’re all rolling the rock up the hill. It tends to be the nature of the industry to load IT staff with lots of work, all of which needs to be completed in a hurry.
It could be that we’re involved in a couple of projects, busy with procurement, testing parts of a system, fielding user queries, fault fixing, or trying to catch up on the often neglected paperwork to keep either the change board or auditors off our backs.
When it comes to scheduling our work, we could all come up with differing priorities for new tasks depending on our current workload, or how we perceive a task’s relevance.
So if a problem or failure occurs, how can we ensure that it is given the correct priority from an enterprise perspective? If we leave it to the individual to decide the priority we cannot guarantee that we get a consistent approach to IT delivery across the enterprise. So what can be done?
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