How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 10. Priority

Understanding how to deal with lots of problems that come at you all at once is why our project in Orange County accomplished so much so quickly. When we arrived on site, nearly everything was a mess, but our client had nailed one really smart step. They had prepared a prioritized list of the symptoms they were experiencing. It looked like this:

Symptom	Priority
S1. Can’t print shipping labels	1
S2. Can’t confirm orders	1
S3. …	2
…	…
S49. …	5

The symptom column told us what we needed to do. The priority column told us what we needed to do next. That list is what got us off to such a fast start.

Priorities don’t have to be unique. In Orange County, both order shipping and order booking were top-priority symptoms. They were both ranked at priority one, because they were equal barriers to surviving past Friday.

It is OK for two or more symptoms to have the same priority, but it leaves open the question of which symptom you should work on first. If you have more than one team (I had half a dozen little teams in Orange County), then you can work on more than one top-priority symptom at the same time. You can in fact work simultaneously on as many top-priority symptoms as you have parallel, independent teams.

But if you have more top-priority symptoms than you have teams to work on them, then you have to choose which symptom is 1.a and which one is 1.b. If you need information to break a tie, then do a surface-level diagnosis of all of the same-priority ...