tiered priorities

[Zoe Girl]

Right now I am waaay over my head at work. We have been given so many things to do over the year that i cannot keep it straight, I am preparing to run a summer camp at our school which is extra pay and I do need this money however I am ready to tell my supervisor I don't want the job after all. I will work at the local amusement park instead! So my deep thought today was about 'tiered priorities' concept and presenting that to my boss to explain some the issue we are all having as a team meeting deadlines and managing competing work interests.

I figure someone out there has an idea of what I am talking about and maybe has a reference that relates. The situation in our department is that we have a process with deadlines to improve each of our childcare sites, the district wants personal goals for many of us and to show progress, our grant based site have 4-5 surveys, summer camp needs major planning, and our department has had 10 criticial incidents (child left on playground and staff does not notice) so we are focusing on child safety big time.

RIght now each one has been presented with extreme urgency and the consequences to us can be high. I want to talk to my supervisor about telling us how they really add up in importance. Of course no one wants to drop an improvement plan however safety and making sure the tasks related to continued funding are a bigger priority. I want to talk about how 'good enough' summer plans are reasonable, I have been working really hard on those and missed some emails about first aid and CPR classes that are mandatory and staff will be turned away for being late even if it is their work schedule.

Okay enough thought, back to work

[SteveinMN]

I don't have any discrete references to tiered priorities, but that notion is not at all new. Sometimes priorities are ranked by necessity. In your case, you have an absolute responsibility to address child safety (those critical incidents you mentioned). Addressing that should be topmost. Any other requirement relating to child or employee safety should have that same priority as well. Then put the projects/tasks that keep you funded. Somewhere well down the list should be the process-improvement steps (unless they relate to one or more of the higher-priority tasks).

We do this all the time in our personal lives. We'll fix the gaping hole in the floor before we'll wallpaper the bedroom. Or we'll push to make sure we get Task A done because, once it's started and waiting on someone else, we can work on Tasks B and C until the other party completes their part of Task A. Resources are not limitless -- not money and not people. Your organization needs to keep the main thing, the main thing.

[jennipurrr]

When I took over in my current position, things in the data entry area were a mess. It is a completely different environment than teaching, but maybe something can help you.

The staff was working on requests as the came rather than prioritizing them, and thus important/visable things were not getting done in a timely manner. The interim manager before me started working on prioritizing, and I continued it. We now have a formal document with the priority of each type of work they do, and how long of a timeline to do that work. So, things that must be completed in less than a day, 1-2 days, a week, two weeks, a month, etc. When that got developed we started looking at ways to improve processes, and that made a big difference, and led to even more prioritizing, LOL. They used to have a very labor intensive process for finding an address for someone we had received a piece of returned mail for as each letter came in. Now, we just mark the address as returned and then run a report weekly that prioritizes (I like to say triage, haha) which ones to work on.

Even without some of the process improvements, just having organization and direction helped a lot I believe.

[razz]

Can you prioritize based on desired outcomes?
First Aid and CPR courses would be high priority on my list so I would have a different notification about upcoming course information delivery system rather than emails for staff enrollment.

[Zoe Girl]

I had a talk with my supervisor and it went okay. She of course is still pushing for the highest quality everything and said next summer there are no excuses for summer programming to not all have all these priorities by hiring the best staff. I told her that I didn't even know I was supposed to hire summer staff until we were into summer planning, she was really unclear on this. So I am considering that part of the first year of this level of summer camp (huge increase) and I just want the same consideration for the rest of us having the same learning curve. She did have a point that I am more involved in the day to day planning than other PS's, and I admit that because I am a teacher and would rather be working directly with the kids than managing paperwork and people.

Now, this may be a new thread, is that I again hired someone wrong. I am pretty pissed off actually. I created this idea for a class and it stalled out while I was hoping to find someone word of mouth. So I didn't and the department posted the job and I hired 2 teachers. I chose people who already worked for our district. So then today i found out I did something wrong, at the beginning of the year I kept on doing things wrong with registration and hiring people because my job position does not do that! There are people that hire and a department that registers but because we created the model of my site as a new style somehow I got all of that. I actually had to really argue with my supervisor that she did not know part of registration and I needed her to learn it (I am the only grant paid site that also charges tuition and she knows nothing about the financial billing process).

I want to tell someone, who knows who and it is probably totally innapropriate, that my boss does not know what she is doing. I am very sensitive to the feeling I am doing something wrong so I may be a little oversensitive here but I am tired of being told to do something and then hearing I did it wrong. In one case I was told to hire summer staff and I got the interview questions from her after I had already talked to people who worked in my school and had decided they were a good fit. I didn't even know I was supposed to go through interview questions and reference checks, etc.

[Zoe Girl]

Can you prioritize based on desired outcomes?
First Aid and CPR courses would be high priority on my list so I would have a different notification about upcoming course information delivery system rather than emails for staff enrollment.

I can definitely do that, in previous years our department has sent out monthly reminders to staff who need training or who are about to expire with a registration form for upcoming classes. People could take CPR or FA or both, the nurse this year refuses to teach them separately and even said everyone had to re-take them with her instead of relying on current certifications. Well she is quitting and this system has even managers expiring without anyone noticing. We relied on the system, in fact there was a binder where I could look up anyone and it doesn't exist this year. i was told to call the staff person, and many of us do not carry our cards.