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Prioritizing IT Projects: How to Do It All (On a Budget)

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Do you remember the Japanese arcade game Whac-A-Mole?

Five cartoon-like moles pop out of holes inside a random waist-high box. The object is to hit the moles with a soft, black mallet to score points.

If you’ve worked in IT long enough, chances are you’ve had several “Whac-a-Mole” days! For example, suppose you’ve finally caught up with your last patch management when dozens of Slack notifications suddenly slip across your monitor.

Several team members inform you of a “503 Service Unavailable” error on the company’s website – yikes. It seems like just when you’ve finished solving an urgent problem, another challenge pops up without warning! That’s part of the fun, right?

IT managers, administrators, and managed service providers (MSPs) must constantly prioritize project wants versus needs. Of course, amid competing user demands, departmental goals, and technical emergencies, prioritizing tasks isn’t easy.

Every day, IT management must ruthlessly weigh corporate initiatives, security priorities, and resources. If this all sounds familiar, this article is for you. Here, we’ll look at how to prioritize concurrent tasks and ensure computing resources are spent as efficiently as possible.

Prioritization of IT projects

What is IT project prioritization?

Let’s start by defining our topic:

Prioritization of IT projects is the process of identifying the most critical tasks needed to achieve IT-related goals. Effective prioritization improves time management, organizational security, business profitability, and employee satisfaction, among other benefits.

That said, each IT department will rank tasks based on their own unique factors. While some teams are driven by the need to maximize ROI, others may have more resources at their disposal. Additionally, organization size, industry, and risk factors also come into play.

Most small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) operate with limited budgets and lean IT teams. For these organizations, it is imperative that IT departments devote money, time and energy to the right projects (and products) at all times.

Weighing Competing organizational needs

IT departments should prioritize projects based on the value they bring to the organization as a whole. The biggest challenge (Read more…)