what are the project priorities? why it is important? how to handle this?

Project priorities used to determine the urgency and importance of a task or project. Project managers use priority to determine who should take ownership of each task and determine timeframe when to expect results in future.

There are many factors which determine priority, including timeframe and budget of project and availability and needed resources and also organization-specific needs. project and program manager must understand these factors against one another to determine which project or task is the highest priority.

project prioritization is the process of determining which potential and already existing projects or task are the most urgent and important along with that addition of new requirements or tasks. This process involves evaluating the criteria which are most relevant to your business and applying them to all of your projects.

With the help of project priority project team can determine ranks based on potential return on investment or understanding on how critical each project or task is to that department. For ex, projects related to application development or web-based security might rank highly. All organization have different needs which require unique prioritization strategies.

Why project prioritization important:

Project priority is ensuring that you correctly allocate company resources based on unique needs. in this prioritizing task, organization can minimize the timeframe and budget it spends on less urgent and important projects.

To handle project priorities follows the steps:

1. start prioritizing projects based on business value: in this step program manager should keep in mind that it requires conversations with your managers, clients, or other key stakeholders. should ask detailed questions to ensure projects which can bring the biggest rise to the top. questions should be prepared already on the basis of requirements and should be flexible according to answers getting.
2. set priorities by identifying urgent and important projects:  In this step need to understand urgent requirements of clients and time they have. An important project can bring value to your business, whether team or program manager feel its impact today or years down the road. along with that urgent project requires immediate attention to stay on track or keep business going.
3. asses your own bandwidth: project team or development team should resolve bigger projects first and that way, everything feels like a quick and it could be time saving. But if its clearing simple projects out of the way which can makes it easier for team to focus on a more complex one. and also, just be aware that stacking heavyweight projects up back-to-back can be a quick drain on project energy. Try alternating big projects with small projects, whenever possible, requires keeping your team fresh and motivated.
4. Determine prioritization criteria: When priority levels of projects are not immediately obvious then determine prioritization criteria based on your organization’s specific needs and goals.
5. Be flexible with the project prioritization process: A project that was once urgent and important might be change by an emergency that pops up. A stakeholder may decide a project which does not bring business value anymore. A key player could get issue unexpectedly, which cause putting a dent in your team’s bandwidth. As project manager can either bend or can break.  need to stay alert and constantly reassess project priorities so you can adjust your team’s focus as needed.