Use strategies and tools to identify priorities for work

For this assessment criterion, you will be required to select and use strategies and tools to identify operational management priorities in setting clear priorities and goals for your team.

Setting priorities is essential for effective business management because it increases efficiency and maximises the use of resources whilst ensuring the most important and urgent tasks a completed first. Prioritization orders tasks from those that are most important/urgent to those that are least important/urgent. It may also be used to identify dependencies between tasks (e.g. although task 1 is more important than task 2, task 1 cannot be started until task 2 is complete). You should also check that tasks are aligned with business objectives – if a task is unlikely to support business objectives then it should probably have a lower priority than those tasks that do.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a tool that may be used to help identify your priorities. Tasks are divided into 4 groups:

1. urgent and important – should be done first
2. not urgent but important – should be scheduled to do soon
3. urgent but not important – should be delegated to others
4. neither urgent nor important. – should be ignored

Project Management expert, Nieto-Rodriguez, devised the Hierarchy of Purpose strategy to help executives to prioritise projects. This framework can be used to ensure that priorities are aligned with business goals and objectives.

When operational management objectives are prioritised, they can be filtered down to teams in the form of priorities and goals.