Here are five frequently asked questions that every PM needs to read:

Principle Three: Prioritize

You’d be surprised at how much time you, and your development team, are wasting by not assigning priority and severity to every task.  Issues come in, bugs are discovered, and new application features are conceived of every day. Every item won’t be crucial to fulfilling your business goal, but your team has no way of concretely which tasks are most important to the company unless someone in management tells them.  Priority tells your team how important it is that they resolve this issue immediately.  Assigning priority and enforcing it, whenever any task or issue is assigned, will make your team work more efficiently.  

Setting priority is akin to designating a time slot for every task that you assign a team member during the day.  Urgent issues and tasks are certain to be tackled first thing in the morning, with low priority items waiting until later on when all others have been completed. With a clear idea of which tasks, issues or tests are most important, your team members can easily plan their days to make the best use of their time.  Think about your own work habits.  Without prioritizing, it’s easy to get caught up in busy work, fielding every new issue that comes in.  But just because an issue was the last one to cross your desk doesn’t make it the most important. Now think about how you structure your own to-do list? If you think that something is critical, but potentially time consuming,are you more or less likely to put it first on your list? However, if you KNOW that this thing is of highest importance to your boss, does it move up on your to-do list?