This post contains affiliate links.
You manage a highly technical project with too many details, which you have to sort and manage carefully, especially if the project is high risk. The complex projects are usually left to a group of project managers to ensure things are done on time. To be honest, managing projects is not a walk in the park; there can be too many factors to consider, and many parties are involved making it difficult to manage if you do not have a plan and cannot prioritise tasks.
Managing projects effectively depend on the project manager’s ability to navigate through the different tasks of the project to sort between the urgent and not so urgent while effectively communicating with engineers and stakeholders to ensure things are delegated well with minimal time and effort lost. The project manager needs to be ready for any issues during the project’s life and develop a counter plan through reprioritising the tasks.
The following are 7 ways to prioritise tasks as a project engineer:
1- Have an action priority list
Project managers have many responsibilities, and prioritising those tasks between urgent and not so urgent is the first thing you can do to become more organised.
The best way to sort your task is to break them into three lists. First is the most urgent, which is your priority list or A list. Second is your B list which is important but not urgent tasks that you can afford to postpone for now. Finally, the C list is the not urgent and not important tasks.
| A-List | B-List | C-List |
|---|---|---|
| Highly urgent | Not urgent | Not urgent |
| Extremely important | Important | Not important |
| Has the highest priority | Still a priority but can be postponed | It can be postponed for a long time |
By sorting your work from highest to lowest priority, you ensure that you are working efficiently and not just wasting your time with tasks that can hold you off from other urgent and important ones. Moreover, you ensure that you work smarter, not harder, and are more likely to finish tasks on time and have as little stress as possible.
2- Use the 20/80 rule
Also known as the Pareto principle, 80% of results come from 20% of the work. Sometimes even urgent work might only bring about 20% of the results, so keep this principle in mind when making your action list.
Knowing what falls into your 20% as a manager comes from understanding your project. There is no point in spending 80% of your time for only 20% of the results. It is counterproductive and will unlikely make much difference to project progression.
Look at your tasks and see how finishing them can contribute to the bigger picture of your project. If the task will only contribute to 20% of the results, ditch it or put it at the bottom of your action list. Focus your efforts on the work that will bring 80% of the results and if you can not do it, find someone else to do it for you.
3- Do not prioritise by email
Very common mistake project managers fall into that almost everyone is guilty of. What is at the top of your inbox is not the most crucial task to do. Instead, you should prioritise your tasks based on what is most important and urgent right now. Those urgent tasks are unlikely to be the fridge office to be cleaned on Friday, but it could be updating your project schedule so that it will be clear to everyone what needs to be done this week.
Checking your emails every time you hear the “bing” sound is extremely unproductive. If you are a busy project manager, you should focus on getting through what makes you busy now instead of distracting yourself with every new email you receive.
As project managers, we can feel obligated to respond to emails as soon as we receive them, especially those from our bosses. This is a very bad practice we fall into, and it usually wastes a tremendous amount of your time and might pull us away from focusing on other important tasks. If you struggle with this problem, this article has proven work strategies to manage emails: 10 Tips To Use Outlook More Productively And Work Smart
4- Prioritise as a team
Projects are done in teams, so it makes sense to prioritise tasks in teams – it should not be your responsibility alone. Get your team to discuss the project, the upcoming tasks and what tasks are dependent on other tasks—this help to meet deadlines.
Be honest with the team and discuss what you can achieve as individuals and in teams. This can help set solid expectations about the project’s progress and foresee any hurdles.
Communication is the key to effective teamwork. Projects usually involve ongoing changes to scope, which means that the team need to be flexible to meet those changes. As a project manager, effective communication comes at the forefront of your skills; however, a few other treats can help you work better in teams; read Top 7 Personality Traits Of Project Manager For Immediate Success.
5- Learn to delegate tasks
You can not do everything by yourself, and there are not enough hours in the day to do everything on your to-do list. This means you out to focus on the urgent and difficult tasks and leave the simple and urgent tasks to others. Effective delegating begins by understanding the difficulty of the task you are trying to delegate and the ability of the person you are trying to delegate the task to.
You do not want to delegate difficult tasks to someone with no experience in that regard, which will take them a long time to complete. At the same time, you do not want to do it all by yourself as we really can not multitask. Finding the best person for the job can be quite easy if you know your team very well.
Humans can not multitask as much as we think. We are wired to do mono tasks very well. As soon as we try to do more than one task simultaneously in the name of productivity, we make mistakes and lose focus. This is where delegation ensures that things are done will no errors. Many project engineers pride themselves on being excellent multitaskers; it is usually the top skill on our resume. If you believe so, I invite you to take a multitasking test and see how our cognitive abilities drop when we multitask: Why We Cannot Multitask? Take a Multitasking Test.
6- Get better at saying NO
Managing projects successfully means that you have to get better at saying NO. People, other managers and stakeholders will try to waste your time by coming up with proposals and more work for you to do, which will delay the job.
The project manager should establish authority and be direct with the client to convey their expertise, and they are the right people for the job, and they know what they are doing. This means saying NO when a silly proposal or idea comes from your client about the project. Sometimes, we can feel obligated to fulfil every client’s unnecessary request, which is why reasoning is important to establish your authority as a project engineer.
On the other hand, distractions might come internally when your boss or other project managers want to pull you into other non-essential tasks. Sometimes there is no easy way to say NO, but you have to if you want to meet the project deadline.
7- Be ready for disruption
You could be the top performer in your organisation and organise tasks extremely well; however, nothing will stop project disruption as they happen a lot, and usually, nothing goes as planned. Unfortunately, there is no formula to predict all project delays and issues, especially those not in your control. However, what you can do to deal with those disruptions is usually within your control.
This means going back to your action list and meeting with the team to develop a solution to combat the disruption, which usually involves delegating tasks and shifting things around to accommodate those changes.
