Doing the Right Thing: Five Powerful Prioritization Strategies for Business Success

If you’re like most businesses, you’ve struggled with managing your company’s workload at some point in your lifecycle—or perhaps even your own personal tasks. People often overestimate their abilities to tackle small tasks or larger projects, negatively impacting productivity. Whether it's the planning fallacy, optimism bias, or overconfidence bias, both individuals and teams often underestimate the time, resources, and effort required to complete tasks, leading to poor prioritization. As a result, meaningful work isn’t getting done, and either you or your organization feels unsuccessful.

As a result, I’m frequently asked about the best way to prioritize, and there are several reasons for this. Sometimes, teams find themselves overwhelmed with too much work and seek an efficient approach to reduce their workload. In other cases, organizations have fallen into unproductive habits and need to refocus on what will generate the most impact. Organizations realize that focusing on what truly matters will yield the most significant value.

Spelling out the priorities

I’ve discovered time and again that understanding various prioritization approaches is essential to determining which is best suited to your organization’s current needs and maturity level. Depending on your organization's current priorities, maturity level, and industry, there are five prioritization strategies worth considering.

1. The Squeaky Wheel Model

While we may not use this exact term, most are familiar with the "Squeaky Wheel" model. This approach occurs when the most vocal person—whether a boss, high-ranking leader, or influential team member—demands attention and resources.

Sometimes, this approach can be beneficial, particularly if the leader has unique insights. For example, the CEO or a senior leader may have critical insight or a vision that others may not see, making it essential to follow their lead at times. It may not always be the leader, either. It could be Jane, who’s usually quiet, but when she speaks, it matters. She’s been with the company for 40 years and knows where the bodies are buried (so to speak). In such cases, it would be best to heed her advice.

However, the loudest voices sometimes don’t align with the most valuable work. The leader’s political motivations (e.g., compensation, re-election, fame) may be misaligned with organizational objectives. As such, this model can derail progress and prevent teams from focusing on empirically urgent or essential tasks in favor of ‘gut feelings.’ The danger is that false urgency precedes critical matters, and valuable opportunities are overlooked.

2. FIFO (First In, First Out)

FIFO is a simple and familiar model. It’s like waiting in line: the first task that comes in gets done first. This model works well in environments where tasks are standardized and processed sequentially but do not vary significantly in complexity or value. Think of call centers, tech support, inventory management, logistics, and the DMV. FIFO may even have a tiered escalation, such as in emergency rooms.

In retail or customer service industries, FIFO can work for basic, repetitive tasks, but it may not always be the most effective approach in more complex work. In dynamic or rapidly changing environments, such as project management or technology—where priorities shift quickly—pushing multi-million-dollar projects through the FIFO model will lead to postponing the important in favor of the urgent. This spells disaster for larger portfolios of work.

3. Cost-Driven Prioritization

For some organizations, cost—whether in terms of resources, time, or money—determines what gets done. This model may prioritize lower-cost tasks because they’re easier to execute or more immediately achievable. Furthermore, since money is correlated with resources and time, if work costs less, it may mean you are using fewer resources or taking less time to perform the work. This, in turn, frees up those resources or availability for other work.

This approach works well in organizations with more predictable and repeatable work, such as marketing agencies, some retail scenarios, and manufacturing environments. For instance, if you run a production line with high-volume, low-complexity products, minimizing costs (e.g., choosing the cheapest materials or the most cost-efficient production method) can help improve margins without sacrificing product quality.

However, while cost is an essential factor, it shouldn’t be the only consideration for many organizations. There’s a risk that focusing too much on cost efficiency could lead to low-value work being completed before work that matters more to customers, yields greater profits, or brings in more revenue. It could also promote a race to the bottom, where work gets commoditized, diluting value, or quality suffers in favor of cost savings. While minimizing cost in the short term can be beneficial, it’s vital to ensure this doesn’t come at the expense of long-term quality or customer satisfaction.

4. Value-Based Prioritization

A value-based prioritization model is often necessary as an organization becomes more complex, particularly in IT, engineering, or construction industries. This approach is essential when an organization is looking for sustainable growth, not just immediate returns. This model assesses the return on investment (ROI), determining which initiatives generate the most value for the company. Methods like cost/benefit analysis, net present value (NPV), and internal rate of return (IRR) can help quantify this.

While financial value can often be quantified, non-financial value is more challenging to measure but still immensely valuable. Some companies could start with financials and then explore blending more non-financial aspects into the prioritization assessments. Organizations should consider Net Promoter Score (NPS) for customer satisfaction, employee NPS (eNPS) for employee satisfaction, brand value, and operational efficacy metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). These non-financial metrics are critical in industries like tech, education, and healthcare, where customer loyalty, employee retention, and social impact play as significant a role as direct financial return.

Organizations can build a model using a mixture of value-based criteria that matter. Value-based prioritization ensures the team works on projects that will provide the highest return on effort, align with strategic objectives, and deliver meaningful results. It encourages companies to focus on what truly matters, even if it’s not always the easiest or quickest task to complete.

5. Value and Risk-Based Prioritization

In more dynamic and high-stakes environments, it's essential to consider both value and risk when prioritizing tasks. A value and risk-based approach involves assessing the potential outcomes of a project (or piece of work), weighing both the value it could bring and the risks it might entail.

Risks come in different types (e.g., operational, financial, reputational, strategic). These risks could be negative (e.g., delays, cost overruns, safety concerns) or positive (e.g., breakthrough opportunities). Opportunity risks represent potential gains (e.g., entering a new market), while threats represent potential losses (e.g., a project delay). Both need to be considered carefully. While most focus will be on preventing what could go wrong, an increased emphasis on positive risk (often identified in a SWOT analysis) can maximize competitive advantage. By evaluating both aspects, organizations can make more informed decisions about which projects to prioritize, ensuring they can mitigate risks while maximizing value.

Weighted Cost (or Weighted Shortest Job First, WSJF) is part of the Agile software development methodology and is a form of Value and Risk-based prioritization. It calculates the cost of delay (opportunity cost) along with the value derived from the work. Though WSJF is more targeted for both value and risk, it still represents a highly mature model. Value and Risk-Based Prioritization may represent a unique way of thinking for many organizations, but it delivers tremendous value in focusing on successful outcomes. As such, organizations should be confident they are prepared for this level of prioritization.

Which of the Five Prioritization Strategies is Right For You

When determining which of the five prioritization strategies is best for your organization, consider your current challenges, maturity level, and context. Prioritization maturity doesn’t relate to intelligence or the organization's size; it is about experiencing each form of prioritization and the organization’s ability to adapt to the next level. Further, some organizations may lean toward one approach, while others might use different models in varying situations. For example, cost-driven models might work well for routine tasks, while value-based models could be more appropriate for complex, high-stakes projects. Regardless of which model you choose, the overall goal is to maximize value while reducing risk and/or accomplishing as much as possible.

If you’re unsure which model will work best for your organization, don’t hesitate to reach out to Union Ridge Consulting. We’re here to help you navigate these decisions and optimize your approach to prioritization.