Prioritising: coordinating handovers
A team can follow its individual priorities while leaving a file waiting between functions. The management question is specific: how should time be organised when each person’s progress depends on someone else’s deliverable?
What the literature establishes
Connie Gersick (1988, Academy of Management Journal) observed that the project teams she studied did not progress through a regular sequence of stages: periods of relative stability were separated by a transition around the midpoint of the available time. Awareness of the time remaining contributed to changes in how they worked. This observation suggests distinguishing the time recorded in calendars from the actual pace of collective progress.
The mechanism: making dependencies understandable
In their review, Gerardo Okhuysen and Beth Bechky (2009, Academy of Management Annals) identify three integrating conditions for coordination: accountability, predictability and common understanding. A shared schedule is therefore insufficient unless it clarifies who must provide what, when and in what usable form. For prioritisation, this shifts attention towards tasks whose delivery enables other people’s work.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that teams should add more milestones and formalise every handover. These works do not demonstrate that more detailed coordination consistently improves outcomes. The appropriate degree of formalisation depends, in particular, on uncertainty in the work and on whether a usable deliverable can be defined in advance. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits of the evidence and of calendars
Connie Gersick’s study draws on a small set of project teams; it does not establish a universal law of work rhythms. Gerardo Okhuysen and Beth Bechky’s review brings together heterogeneous research rather than testing a single scheduling method. In practice, a calendar shows planned availability, but rarely whether the input awaited by the next colleague is actually ready to use.
A practical check in Genève
Within SHR’s “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, one exercise is to track a Geneva-based workflow for two weeks: file approval in private banking, preparation of a briefing note in an international organisation, quality approval in luxury watchmaking or document processing in commodity trading. For each handover, record the expected deliverable, its recipient, the time of transmission and the time at which the recipient considers it usable. Then measure the median interval between transmission and usability, distinguishing waiting for someone to pick up the work from requests for additional information. This record does not prove the effectiveness of training; it helps establish whether the next adjustment should concern task sequencing, the recipient’s availability or the definition of the deliverable. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Geneva, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Geneva
- time management & prioritisation
- Geneva
- research
- training geneva