Don’t Just Prioritize Tasks, Say "No" to Some

Good time and project management doesn't necessarily mean doing everything requested. More importantly, it means doing what is best for your organization, even when the organization may not realize it. Success and achievement are not measured by doing everything requested of you. It's measure by doing the right things. Sometimes to improve productivity and be successful, you must say "no" to some tasks, or at least defer some.

Set Goals

Understand what you must accomplish and when it’s actually needed. Goals give you a destination and vision to work toward. When you know where you want to go, you can manage your priorities, time, and resources to get there. Goals also help you decide what's worth spending your time on, what's not an immediate priority, and identify what's just a distraction.

Prioritize Tasks

One of the biggest work challenges that many people face is accurately prioritizing their workload. Here are some guidelines to prioritizing your task list to keep you well-organized:

• Collect a list of all your tasks: Pull together every request made of you that you could possibly consider getting done. Don’t worry about the order, or the number of items up front.
• Identify urgent vs. important: See if you have any tasks that need immediate attention - work that if not completed on time will have serious negative consequences. Those are important.
• Assess task value: Look at your important work and identify what carries the highest value to your business and organization. For example, focus on client requests before internal work, organizational requirements before desired requests, and how many people are impacted by your work.
• Check priority daily: Be flexible and adaptable. Know that your priorities will change and sometimes when you least expect them to. Keep focused and committed to the tasks you’re committed to doing right now.

It's OK to  say "No"

You may not be able to get to everything on your list. After you prioritize your tasks and add up the ranged estimates, cut the remaining tasks from your list. Focus on the priorities that you know you must and can complete. You can revisit the other tasks at a later time.

You can apply the above strategy to large-scale projects as well as to your daily workload.

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David Schuchman

Why Hire a Professional Contractor

I write this post having recently started my own IT consulting company, Princeton Technology Advisors, LLC. In making this career decision, I reflected on why I previously contracted with professional consultants, and how I demonstrated doing so will bring value to my projects and the organizations where I worked.

A consultant is a person that is a subject matter expert who is paid to perform a specific set of tasks over a set period of time for an agreed upon sum of money. In this case, I mean for you to consider when it is appropriate to hire an IT consulting professional for your next important project.

As you approach starting a new project, take stock in the skills, backgrounds and timely availability of the in-house resources already accessible to you. Then, determine the skills and availability that you need to complete your new project on schedule. If there are gaps between those two reviews, consider bringing in consulting professionals. It’s important that the assessment of the skills, backgrounds and availability are performed objectively. An over confident or over ambitious program manager may not see these clearly (or truthfully).

What a professional consultant brings to a project are:

• Works with you, your team and/or your management on goals and deliverables.
• Accountability for results, schedule and costs to complete key project tasks. These tasks and goals can be identified and added to the contract, which can translate into significant economies as compared to in-house efforts.
• A proven methodology and skill set applied to the appropriate tasks.
• Creativity drawn from a robust base of prior experiences.
• No significant cost of training or “experimenting” on how to complete the assignment. The consultant will focus on achieving results. Training of in-house staff can be scheduled into the project both during execution or as the final tasks to perform.

Once you determine that you will hire a consultant, you have several options for finding the right resources:

• If your project involves purchasing a product, consider the vendor. While this may appear to be a costly upfront option (e.g. highest hourly rate), the vendor will provide well-trained product resources that will effectively perform the needed tasks.
• Large multi-disciplined contracting companies have a variety of technical resources and specialties within their in-house staff. Some specialize in a specific set of technologies. While that can provide good value to your organization, you need to be sure the companies you speak with actually have in-house staff proficient in skill sets that your project needs.
• An independent general contractor is a consultant who will manage your project and has access to a wide variety of the specialty sub-contractors needed on your project. It is often the case that the general contractor can be more cost effective and flexible as compared to specialty contractors since the team assembled is not limited to in-house resources. In addition, an independent general contractor typically does not have the overhead of larger firms.

Hiring a consultant can be extremely advantageous by helping you plan, manage, and implement your key project goals. The apparent cost may actually be less than the real cost when you consider the benefits gained from hiring a professional consultant for your short-term needs.


I encourage you to leave a comment by clicking on "...comments" below...
David Schuchman