Start fewer things and finish more of them

Busy teams can look productive while making surprisingly little progress. When too many projects compete for the same people, attention and budget, valuable work remains unfinished—and your organisation waits longer for the benefits.

A common problem I see in many organisations is that they're trying to do many things at the same time.

This usually starts because they've identified a long list of problems and a long list of opportunities, and they want to address them all. It's not the wanting to do them all that's the problem. It's the wanting to do them all at the same time. 

My advice to them is to start fewer things and finish more of them. In this article, I explain why. 

In a factory, the impact of work in progress (WIP) is easy to see. It appears as half-finished products cluttering the factory floor. The cost is equally visible: you have bought raw materials, invested time and incurred production costs, but the product is not complete. You cannot sell it, so it cannot yet generate revenue.

In general, excessive work in progress leads to higher costs, delayed revenue and a greater need for working capital.

The hidden cost of work in progress in knowledge work

In an office, consultancy, professional-services firm or technology business, WIP is less visible. There may be no physical stock on the floor, but the same problem exists when you have too many projects underway relative to the people and capacity available.

The financial cost still shows up as money spent on work that has not yet produced a return. But the wider costs can be even more damaging, including:

• Increased context switching, as people move repeatedly between projects rather than concentrating on completing one meaningful piece of work.
• Higher administrative overhead, including more complex budgeting, planning, reporting, governance and meetings.
• Slower decision-making, because leaders have more initiatives, dependencies and trade-offs to manage.
• Reduced accountability, as priorities become blurred and it is harder to see who owns what.
• Delayed learning and value creation, because you do not get the feedback, revenue or operational benefits that come from finishing and implementing work.

Think about the projects currently under way in your organisation. How many are genuinely moving towards completion? How many are consuming attention simply because they were started?

Strategy is about focus

Strategy is, in large part, about focus. It means choosing the few things that matter most, rather than throwing as many initiatives at the wall as possible and hoping that something sticks.

This does not mean that every organisation should pursue only one initiative at a time. Most businesses need a balanced portfolio of operational, improvement and growth activity. However, it does mean being realistic about capacity. If everything is important, nothing receives the sustained attention needed to deliver results.

As soon as you start spending money on an initiative, you should seek to complete it as quickly as practical so that you can begin to earn a return on that investment.

For example, suppose you have two initiatives, each requiring one person-month of effort. In many cases, you are better off putting the full month into the first initiative, completing it and beginning to realise its value before you start the second. If instead you spend half a month on each, neither is complete after the first month—and neither can yet deliver its intended benefit.

Completion creates options. It may create revenue, reduce cost, improve customer experience, release capacity or provide the capabilities needed for the next strategic move.

Prioritise before you start

Reducing WIP requires more than telling people to work harder or faster. It requires clearer strategic choices.

There are three problems to solve:

1. Packaging: how can you break work up into the smallest units that create meaningful value? In general terms, value means either something that the client or customer is willing to pay for, or something that reduces the cost to you of producing or providing something for which they already pay.
2. Prioritisation: which initiative or unit of work should you do first because it is the most important and offers the greatest value?
3. Sequencing: which initiative or unit of work are you best able to complete first—because you already have the necessary capability, or because completing it will make the next initiative easier to deliver?

Packaging helps you create smaller, meaningful pieces of work that can be completed and begin delivering value sooner. Prioritisation helps you decide what deserves scarce resources. Sequencing helps you decide the order in which work should happen. Together, they turn a long list of good ideas into a practical route to execution.

Before starting anything new, ask: “What will we defer, pause or stop to create the capacity to do this new thing?”

Finish work, realise value, then move on

Before launching another project, ask a few disciplined questions:

• What work are we already funding that has not yet delivered value?
• Can we break this work into smaller units that deliver meaningful value sooner?
• Which initiatives are genuinely strategic, rather than merely desirable?
• What would we need to pause, stop or complete before taking on something new?
• Which completed initiative would unlock the most value or capability for the organisation?
• Do we have the people, time and leadership attention to deliver this properly?

The answers may be uncomfortable. They may require you to stop initiatives that once seemed promising. But stopping or pausing lower-priority work is often what gives your most important work a real chance of succeeding.

Prioritise your existing schedule

If you already have too many initiatives on the go, you can still fix that:

1. Make a list of all of your current initiatives.
2. Identify the key resources working on them, and the roles they play on each. An Initiative RASCI Matrix can help you do this.
3. Highlight resources over-allocated across many initiatives. These are your bottlenecks. Any many organisations, a small number of key resources and decision makers are over-allocated across a wide number of initiatives, causing problems.
4. Consider which initiatives are already struggling to make progress. An Initiative Status Report can help you do this.
5. Either re-allocate resources, or prioritise the initiatives.
6. Pause the lower priority initiatives until the higher priority initiatives have completed, especially where the lower priority initiatives are causing the high priority initiatives to stall.

How StratNav can help

StratNav can help you make these packaging, prioritisation and sequencing decisions, connect them to your strategic goals, measures, initiatives and actions, and manage them through to execution. Try StratNav to bring greater focus to the work that matters most.