Mission impossible? The fine art of the push back

How can you survive, or even thrive when you’re asked to do more in less time?

Have you been tearing your hair out over a project which at the start seemed daring, exciting and, most important of all, eminently possible?

What happened? One day you were happily delivering ahead of deadline, on budget and keeping all your stakeholders engaged. You were juggling this with your other tasks – it was all going swimmingly.

Then, one day the rules change. Maybe there’s a rumour that a competitor is bringing something similar to market, or perhaps an unchecked board member has had a ‘great idea’. Suddenly you’re required to deliver more, faster and your stakeholders are non to happy when you ask them for more resource in this brave new world.

In this situation you have two choices. Try to do it all, or push back and see where the absolute requirements are. I wouldn’t recommend trying to do it all – that way madness lies.

So how do you set about delivering the new priorities without staying until midnight every night? Negotiate.

You have two things to play with. Time and resource. You can do more faster with more resource, or you can do more, but slower and reprioritised to meet requirements.

First, understand the reason for the new requirements. It’s unlikely you’re being asked to do something just for the sake of it. Once you have this information you can look at everything with new eyes and see where there might be some movement.

Ruthlessly prioritise everything on your to do list, not just the project in question, but everything.

Appraise how much resource you have. If it’s just you, how much time do you have available? If you’re working as part of a team, how much of their time do you have?

Which of your new priorities are achievable within deadline? Which need to either move or have more resource assigned to them to be achieved on time?

Then make a proposal to your boss or board. Explain what you can and can’t do within existing resource and make the case for more time or more resource if they still want ‘everything’.

With a bit of luck you’ll walk away with a viable way to meet the new priorities and no need to sleep under your desk!