Setting your priorities

Priorities are set by an owner, admin or manager, and there is a catalog to start from so you are not staring at an empty field.

Starting from the catalog

The catalog covers the outcomes that come up repeatedly: compliance programs, market expansion, acquisitions, cost reduction, customer requirements, incident response maturity. Each template arrives already mapped to the capabilities that outcome usually depends on, which saves you the first hour of work and gives you something to argue with.

Choose a template and it becomes yours. Rename it, change the target date, adjust which capabilities matter. The template is a starting point, not a constraint.

Writing your own

Anything the catalog does not cover, you write directly. Give it a name leadership would recognize, a category, a priority level and a target date. Then map it to the capabilities it depends on, which is the step that makes it measurable.

Keep the list short

A board has three to five things it genuinely cares about this year. A list of twenty priorities is a list of none, and the surface is more useful when it reflects real focus. Priorities can be retired when they are met or abandoned, and the record of what you were tracking stays.

Next: Mapping priorities to capabilities.