Some people may yawn at the thought of having to manage and prioritize a set of projects.  But if you have a vision and goals for your organization and your team (and you should), then determining priorities – determining who works on what – is a highly charged and motivated activity.  Every effective user experience team manager should have a solid system in place to allow for repeatable, predictable project prioritization and resource allocation.

Here’s a set of steps you can take to get control over your list of projects:

1    Hold a regular project queue meeting
Invite your key staff – discipline leads, senior folks.  If your team is dealing with new project requests every week, meet weekly.  Split the meeting in three: new project requests, in-flight project issues, closing projects.  Project prioritization tends to happen in the “new project requests” part, on which the rest of the steps focus.

2    Maintain a project queue
Of course!  But the key word here is “maintain”.  It’s not easy to keep a queue current.  Holding a regular queue meeting helps.  As new requests come in, get them into the project queue for “processing” at your next project queue meeting.  When you have a queue document, publish it, make sure everyone on the team has access, and did I mention keep it current?

3    What’s the priority? – Use a project priority scoring system
If you’re getting more requests than your team can handle, you need to have a systematic way of determining what you work on and what you can say no to.  You have a vision for your team.  You have goals.  Create a scoring system that uses those goals to evaluate every project request and come up with a priority score.

4    What’s the effort? – Use a simple sizing system
Determining priority is one thing.  Determining the effort required is another.  That’s right.  Effort is separate from priority.  Sizing the effort to complete a project is not easy, and comes with experience, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a system that uses consistent criteria to determine the hours of designer or researcher time required to get the job done.

5    Who can work on it? – Track the capacity of your team
If you’re allocating team members to projects, you need to know how many human-hours you have to work with?  In one quarter, a team member may have something like 700 hours available to work on projects.  If you’ve been estimating the size of projects, you have an idea of how many hours have been allocated and what’s left.

6    Draw the line
Now you have a project queue, priority scores for each, sizings for each, and number of hours to allocate.  Sort your projects by priority, and start allocating team members to projects based on hours available.  When time runs out, you draw the line.

Download: Project queue tool