Think People Are Too Busy? Think Again.
“We’re too busy” kills many justifiable projects before they start. Some organizations overcome this resistance, not because they’re less busy, but because they view their business holistically and fit projects into their daily activities, without hiring expensive contractors. Here’s how:
- Prioritize more than the project portfolio. You might think you’re all set by prioritizing all the projects in your portfolio based on business strategy, objectives, business value, and other factors. But that isn’t enough. To balance workload between projects and day-to-day operational activities, PMs and sponsors need to prioritize both project work and day-to-day operations effort. For example, a senior help desk analyst might jump off the support line to work on project tasks. If the call queue reaches 20, they go back to taking calls until the queue drops to 10. In another example, financial staff might be assigned to project work for 2 hours every day, except for when they complete month-end accounting. In addition, if there’s an emergency, such as misclassified transactions, they would stop project work until the emergency is resolved. Otherwise, their highest-priority work is completing project tasks for their designated project time.
- Evaluate the capacity of organizational change agents in the organization. In most organizations, a small number of highly experienced, capable people drive large-scale change. They are typically called “change agents” and comprise a mix of management and expert team-leaders. Instead of focusing on the capacity of all employees, look at the workload and remaining capacity of these change agents. Identify the business impact of their work and prioritize accordingly. See which part of the business they change and check the priority of projects in that area of the business. Then launch the highest priority projects in their area when they have available time to work on it.
- Use phased rollouts with minimal scope. The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach works for several reasons. For justifying a project, the smallest possible scope requires less immediate commitment from operational team members. Start with a pilot that delivers quick wins with a few resources. This reduces the perceived burden of additional work. It also builds credibility and enthusiasm that makes it easier to staff subsequent phases.
- Justify and describe project objectives in terms of operational work relief. Don’t focus on the workload that project work creates. Instead, highlight how the projects will ultimately make day-to-day operational work easier and less annoying. When team members see that a process improvement project will eliminate the tedious manual data reconciliation that eats up their Fridays, their resistance might change into enthusiastic support. Connect each project directly to the pain points people feel, and they’ll make time for project work.
Coming Up
Many different audiences make up a project team, from the project sponsor and customer to numerous stakeholders, to various teams that take on the work in the work breakdown structure. These audiences often need different information, prefer different communication methods and frequencies, and come with unique perspectives and idiosyncrasies. I’m a big believer in effective communication, so I’m looking forward to this conversation with Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes. I hope you’ll join us on Friday, April 10, 2026 at 11am MT/1pm ET. Click here to join!
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