One of the issues that my group faces is our backlog of projects. Early in 2012 we all sat down with our lists of different things we were working on, or had been stacking up because we were not able to get to them. Once we had them all down in a spreadsheet format, our manager was able to prioritize them based on business needs. We thought this was a good start on getting a handle on all the things that were on our plates.
Later in the year our company opted to go with the kanban way of organizing our work (the kanban way of tracking projects is definitely worth its own post!). This involved getting projects down on notecards that are kept on a large board on a wall so that they can be moved around as they are worked on. This concept is wonderful for allowing everyone who is interested to see what each of us is working on. If they have a project for us, they can follow its progress across the board. But, there was no way that we could find to put definitive overall project priorities on these kanban projects that is so easy to see in a spreadsheet format.
Unfortunately, we are still at an impasse on how to proceed on this. Today we took our (now several months-old) project spreadsheet and gave it a good update. We’re also trying to clean up our kanban board (some time ago we switched from a physical board to a digital web format). Somehow we’re going to combine the two…