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top-priority project and assign it priority 1, then the lowest-priority project and assign it
priority 20. Each additional project should then be prioritized in relation to those. (If it is
absolutely impossible to decide the relative priority of two projects, he can flip a coin; if
the coin’s answer seems wrong, he should reverse it. This is a helpful way to “force” him
to consider the alternative.)

The final result of the prioritization process is a list of projects that are arranged in order of
priority, with a unique priority must be assigned to each project. This list of projects
should also indicate which projects are dependent on other ones. This inclusion means
that when a team member is identifying the next task to work on, its dependencies can be
taken into consideration.

It is often tempting to assign the same priority to two different projects that seem to be
equally important to the organization. It is sometimes difficult to make priority decisions;
basically, they amount to deciding that one project may be delayed at the expense of
another. But if these decisions are not made, that can lead to serious project problems. The
most common problem is that the team ends up with several projects that are top priority,
and it’s not clear which one should be worked on next. This is bad because it’s almost
always the case that one of those projects really is more important that the others, so there
is a good chance the team will work on a less important project. When many projects have
a priority of 1 assigned, then the prioritization is essentially useless.
Once priorities are assigned to all projects, it’s time to assign resources to the tasks. Each
resource should be assigned to the next task on the project with the highest priority that
does not yet have work being done. This is not necessarily a hard-and-fast rule: if a task on
a lower-priority project must be done in order to make the schedules work out properly
and to avoid over-allocation, the schedules should reflect that. And in many cases, there is
only one person on the team who has the expertise to perform a specific task. But, wher-
ever possible, the priorities should be honored.
Finally, a periodic priority meeting should be held to reevaluate the project priorities.
Some organizations do this weekly, while others do it every two weeks or even monthly.
This meeting can be piggybacked on the status meeting, as long as all of the project’s deci-
sion-makers are there. The important part is that everyone is kept in the loop: the project

manager, the lead decision-maker, and the stakeholders for the projects.

Use the Schedule to Manage Commitments

A project schedule represents a commitment by the team to perform a set of tasks. When the
project manager adds a task to the schedule and it’s agreed upon by the team, the person
who is assigned to that task now has a commitment to complete it by the task’s due date.
Senior managers feel that they can depend on the schedule as an accurate forecast of how
the project is going to go—when the schedule slips, it’s treated as an exception, and an
explanation is required. For this reason, the schedule is a powerful tool for commitment
management.

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