June 11th, 2025
“Some men see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’” — Robert F. Kennedy
Too often, work begins without clarity on why it matters – or if it matters at all. In this post, I’ll unpack how teams and organizations can create a simple, transparent, and value-driven prioritization process that eliminates chaos, engages stakeholders early, and maximizes business outcomes.
When I talk about prioritization of work I mean deciding in what order time and attention will be focused on this work (or whether it gets done at all). When a person or team says “I don’t have time for X” they are also implicitly saying “I am prioritizing other things above X” – hopefully (but not always) because those things are more important.
LinkedIn has been rife with posts about the importance of project management and change management and how they’re different. Some people have heated opinions about where lines of responsibility should be drawn between delivering projects and making sure that the project delivered is used effectively (often what is meant by “change adoption”).
I rarely see any heated opinions about prioritization. It isn’t because the process of deciding what needs to be done is obvious, clear and efficient. The opposite, in fact. Many organizations don’t have any process for deciding what work deserves our attention, and many project teams couldn’t tell you why they are working on one thing versus another.
This can result in work selection based on weak criteria like “someone important said we should do this” or “we’ve always done it this way” or “this was the latest emergency”.
When that is how your projects are prioritized you probably do need a project manager devoted to constant stakeholder alignment, continuous wrangling of the delivery team to ensure commitment and reduce distractions and a “because I said so” mentality.
You will need someone thinking about change adoption and how to convince the people who will need to change as a result of this project that they should care about what is delivered – because they might not have any idea why they should care.
Why not smooth out the tension between delivery and adoption before work begins? Why not assess the relative importance of each initiative, involve those who will be impacted, and clarify the value up front? Why not have a prioritization process that allows every stakeholder of the team to understand what order work will be done and more importantly – why?
I’ve seen prioritization at every level of maturity — from the chaos of a leader saying “do it all, do it right, do it now,” to a well-oiled system where stakeholders used a clear business value framework to generate a transparent, sequenced list of priorities. That list guided both department-level strategy and individual team focus and virtually eliminated confusion and unplanned distractions.
Reaching a mature prioritization process doesn’t require bureaucracy, just clarity and discipline. Here’s a simple framework any team can start using:
Define Business Value
Start by agreeing on what “value” means for your context. Revenue generation and cost savings will almost always be on the list. In the life insurance underwriting space you’re probably also thinking about decision speed, customer experience, mortality improvement, reduction of not-takens, etc.
Identify the Right Voices
Bring together a handful people who can best explain potential benefits and risks — including customer, operational, and compliance perspectives.
Include the Delivery Team
Hearing prioritization discussions and contributing to them create an understanding of the importance of the work (virtually eliminating the need for “project wrangling” later) and give them an opportunity to point out risks and share the effort that would go into delivering this work.
Prioritize by ROI
Rank work based on business value-to-effort ratio. Adjust only for hard constraints (e.g. deadlines or regulations).
This isn’t a complicated process, and it works amazingly well. With just an hour every two weeks you can give everyone a clear understanding of the priorities, the value that will be generated by the work, and why the work is needed.
Stakeholder management will drop to near-zero since they were all part of the decision-making process, and interruptions minimized since priorities are clear.
Lack of team member buy-in and participation, or finding ways to be too busy for this work because of something else someone else asked for will dry up.
If it is difficult to get to a shared understanding of business value that may be a sign that the organization needs clearer strategic goals, or that departments need help translating them into meaningful department-level goals.
The biggest challenge will be to convince “because I said so” managers and leaders that a collaborative value-based process for deciding your priorities will be the best thing for the business, as it may threaten their personal power. Where I have seen resistance to the introduction of a system like this it is never for reasons that benefit the organization – only for reasons that benefit the individual leader.
Need help setting up a prioritization process for your team or organization? Please reach out at al@melecoaching.com and I’m happy to help.
Tell Me More (Additional Reading)
- Move Fast & Fix Things – Frei & Morriss
- Ask – Wetzler
- Project to Product – Kersten
