LEAP — prioritise the top problems

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do” — Jessica Jackley

The biggest problem I see in business is lack of focus and lack of prioritisation.

The bigger the company the bigger the problem seems to be. Smaller companies have got very limited resources and if they don’t focus on the most important issues they go out of business.

Bigger organisations have got a luxury that when they dedicate resources to a project that doesn’t add much value it won’t kill the company. However it’s potentially even a bigger problem given the size of these companies and number of people reliant on them.

These companies get complacent and unlearn how to focus. And when the economy or their market change and they absolutely need to become sharp again they don’t know how any more.

It’s like a tiger who had been caught out in the wild and moved to a ZOO where it’s been fed for years. If you now wanted to return this animal back into the wild it might struggle to hunt again.

How does the lack of prioritisation in business look like?

In one word: Busy-ness.

Everyone is constantly busy, each person has a dozen of projects on the go at any point in time, running from one meeting to the next, working late and over lunch and still having no time for the actual work.

The biggest problem of too many projects is not just the time they take but the time it takes to switch between them.

However not all the projects are created equal — if you were able to evaluate all the projects you would probably see that each of them has got a different value and promises different return on investment (ROI).

The time you spend on the most valuable project will be significantly more beneficial than time spent on low value tasks. So by not focusing on the top priority all the time actually artificially reduces people’s productivity.

One of the reasons is that people don’t know what is the value and ROI of each project. They get too excited or too busy diving into the project that they don’t ask how much value there is to be had.

I know this from my own experience. I was there and I still fall into that trap every now and then — especially when I know exactly how to tackle a project and I know I can do it quickly and well. But luckily I’m falling into the trap less often these days now that I am more aware of it.

Here is a simple framework I use for prioritising what to work on.

It’s called LEAP and it’s got four stages:

1. List

When prioritising what to work on, the first step is to list the problems. Problems! is the key word. Many people when they come to this stage list projects, ideas of what they could do. But that’s misleading. Every project should be solving a problem and to accurately prioritise we first need to rank problems and opportunities.

2. Estimate

Once you’ve listed all the problems and opportunites, do a high level estimation of how big the problem is — is it £10k, £100k, £1M, £10M? Use a range if it helps, just get an idea how big the problem or opportunity is so you can compare them to each other.

When estimating it is helpful to get an idea how you could calculate the benefit, it will help you get more realistic and accurate estimates rather than just pulling the numbers out of thin air, which is sadly a common approach.

Also estimate how long it would take to resolve a particular problem. Days, weeks, month, years?

3. Analyse

Take the problems and opportunities. You don’t necessarily need to do all of them, just the lucrative ones based on the combination of size of opportunity and length of time estimate.

Look how you could more accurately evaluate the benefit, get the data and analyse it. This will give you a much more accurate idea of the potential size of the benefits and you will grow your confidence the opportunity is real before you invest too much time and money into a specific initiative.

4. Prioritise

Now rank your problems and opportunities using the value of the benefit, look at the time it is likely to take to resolve and pick the top problem or opportunity to tackle.

Assign it to a single person and they can turn it into a project. If you’ve got more individuals who can lead a project as their top priority, you can continue taking on more problems.

LEAP

Keep your problem list as a live document (simple spreadsheet will do), whenever you are thinking of a new problem — just add it on the list.

Whenever you think of a new ‘project’, think about the problem this project should solve and add the problem to the list.

Use your resources wisely. Especially time and focus, two of the most precious assets. LEAP. Prioritise!