Project Prioritisation In Project Management

Disciplined time management is fundamental to effective project management, if a project manager cannot control his own time, then the project cannot be controlled. (Kerzner, 2013). Key elements to time management are planning and prioritisation. Planning is a system in which you categorise what you need to do for a project such as determining objectives, identifying achievement steps, the breakdown of the task into components tasks, time taken and identification of what you require from others (Caunt, 2013, 27). This indicates that a plan can be likend to a process in which steps have to be clearly defined in order for it to work. Plans should always be time bound, giving the relation to time maagement, planning is as fundamental to time

When starting a project prioritising from day 1 is important as you have to map out the milestones for the project. Identifying the tasks you need to accomplish your goals, assign a value to them so you can order your daily list (Zeller, 2012, ). As such assigning a value to tasks in order of criticality is a prioritisation method from day one on a project. Prioirtising the wrong objectives can be a risk to an overall project as (Atkinson, 2009, 47) comments that ‘ A job may need to be done and you may have to do it, but if it doesn’t move you nearer to achieving your job purpose it is considered not important’. This suggests that being a good prioritiser is knowing when a task needs doing but it is not important. There are priortising methods that project managers use to prioritise their work (Owen, 2013)such as ‘Pareto’s 80/20 rule is non-scientific assumption that 80% of the results can be achived with 20% of the effort’. Which can be interpreted as prioirtising your focus to the items with the biggest impact so that 20% of you effort could achieve 80% of visible results or the other way round where 80% of your effort achives 20% of tasks. Although this method can be

Having a plan and not being able to prioritise presents its own challenges around dictating what is a critical project task and what isnt increasing the risk to the delivery of a project. Investing the time into the pre-project phase and identifying restraints, timeline, external factors, project risk and resources will allow greater control over the delivery of a project. The role of a project manager within JLL is to to deliver a project and take overall responsibility in relation to planning and prioritising tasks to deliver the project and also being able to make decisions. The impact of planning and prioirtisation within project managent in JLL is dependant on the project manager’s capabilities in relation to delivering a project. Whilst a project manager can have a good plan and be a good prioritiser there will always be uncertainties and external threats that can undermine a