Killing the Wrong Projects: The Hidden Costs of Broken Prioritization

About this webinar

When Marketing, Sales, HR and other functions each name their own top priorities but draw on the same people, sensible local choices collide. Stuart opens with an early customer example where 80% of one utility’s portfolio was marked priority one, yet a third of the portfolio turned out to be obsolete. Bill connects that pattern to multitasking, sponsor-backed pet projects and teams being asked to support more work than shared resources can realistically carry.

Bill’s answer is simple to state and harder to implement: create one visible priority order across functions, get executives to support it, and use real delivery and capacity evidence when competing demands cannot all be supported.

What you’ll hear

• Make one priority order matter across functions. Bill describes publishing a common order that teams could use when resource demands conflicted. It gave people a basis for pushing back on lower-priority work and helped executives focus on removing roadblocks from the work that mattered most. “It was all about completing, not starting.”
• Build the case from your own organization. Bill starts with conversations across functions, recurring complaints and delivery data, takes that case to the PMO’s own executive first, then helps that executive win over their peers. The aim is to show leaders a problem they already recognize in their own organization.
• Make capacity part of the decision. Bill separates operational work from project work, uses timesheet data to understand where people’s time is going and looks forward at project demand. He is blunt that the data has to be mandated from the top: “You can’t grassroots timesheets.” A priority order becomes more useful when leadership can see whether the planned work can actually fit.
• Choose a method the organization will actually use. Stuart argues for AHP to expose and structure different leadership judgments. Bill agrees with the value of the method but warns about “funny math” in weighted scoring and the harder challenge of getting executives to act as one leadership team rather than functional representatives.
• Start small and improve. Bill favors a crawl-walk-run approach: pilot the process, learn what works and expand it rather than waiting for a perfect enterprise design.

The thread running through the conversation is that prioritization only becomes useful when it changes real behavior: what gets attention, what waits, where executives intervene and how much work the organization is genuinely prepared to support.