You Can’t Do it All – Enterprise Edition

We haven’t had a wonky Wednesday in a while, have we?

All right, so let’s tackle something that affects businesses big and small. In fact, it affects families, too. How many times have there been “too many things” to do or deal with in a week?

As it happens, I deal with project selection at work — and it makes me long for the family-based stuff. Why? The number of players involved in “what to do?” for a business is, more often than not, exponentially larger for a start. And if you think trying to get a five-year-old to accept you’re not buying everything in the toy store, just wait ’til you have to let an executive know they can’t get all of their 27 initiatives funded.

As probably comes as no surprise, the folks over at Harvard Business Review have thought about this a lot — and have come up with a list of seven ways in which your organization might be holding onto too many projects.

By definition, this really should be more useful to those of you dealing with project selection (and, frankly, killing off zombie projects) at work. But if you apply bits and pieces of this to the fam, I won’t tell.