🤹‍♀️ How to prioritize challenges when owning multiple programs

👋🏾 Welcome to The Program Playground newsletter!

I’m Jara, a Senior Program Manager. I created The Program Playground to help you go from an idea to a ready-to-launch program. In this newsletter, you'll find tips, tricks, and best practices to help you build programs, and maximize your impact on your audience.

Here’s this week’s TL;DR

• You’ve got 99 program problems. Here’s how to prioritize

Assessing priority when things go left 🚩

As a planner, it pains me to say this, but, it’s ok if things don’t go as planned. In fact, it’s likely that most things won’t, especially in a highly collaborative and highly visible program.

When you encounter a gap or pivot point in your programs, take two steps: 1) define the problem and 2) assess its priority. To determine priority, consider the following:

• Company priority: How important is this issue to your organization? Is it a top-level OKR? Or is it a #SideQuest?

• Level of collaboration: How many teams are involved? Low collaboration might involve just you and a colleague, while high collaboration includes multiple teams

• Risk potential: What are the consequences if the issue remains unresolved? High risk could disrupt the entire program and impact everyone, while low risk may affect only a few people

Let’s do a ~scenario! 👩‍🏭 

Context:

• Program A is lower priority, but highly cross-functional 

• Program B is the highest priority, but low collaboration 

Scenario: During your daily review, you see that Program A’s automation workflow broke late last night and Program B’s proposal was rejected by a stakeholder.

How would you handle this?

Since Program A is highly cross-functional, it’s important to communicate the issue immediately, even if it’s not your top priority. You should inform the relevant teams by sending a message along the lines of, “FYI: It looks like our automation is currently down. I don’t anticipate this will impact any workstreams, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up. I plan to resolve this by EOD Tuesday.” This keeps everyone in the loop without requiring immediate action, allowing you to prioritize communication over immediate fixes.

With Program A addressed, you can now focus on Program B, which is the highest priority and higher risk, even though it requires less collaboration.

By handling communication for Program A first, then shifting your full attention to Program B, you're effectively managing both program challenges!

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