Prioritisation: should teams wait until halfway through a project to change direction?
A project can retain its initial direction for a long time, even when team members have new information. The managerial question is specific: when should priorities be reviewed so that the team still has room to change course?
What the literature establishes
Drawing on project teams observed in their working environments, Connie Gersick (1988, Academy of Management Journal) describes development that is not simply gradual. Periods of relative stability are separated by a transition in which the team reconsiders how it works. In the groups studied, this transition occurs around the halfway point of the available time: the schedule appears to structure change, rather than merely record progress.
Remaining time as a trigger
In an experimental setting, Connie Gersick (1989, Academy of Management Journal) also finds midpoint-related transitions in groups working towards a deadline. These findings support a temporal-awareness mechanism: recognising that a substantial part of the available time has elapsed can prompt a reassessment of the initial approach. Prioritisation may therefore also depend on when the team collectively takes stock of the time remaining.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that scheduling a midpoint review is all that is needed. Yet these studies establish neither that this timing is optimal nor that an imposed review has the same effect as a spontaneous transition. When decisions commit resources that are difficult to reallocate, waiting until this point may already leave too little room for adjustment. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot prescribe
These studies concern groups with an identifiable task and deadline; they do not directly describe continuous operations or portfolios of interdependent projects. Nor do they establish the effectiveness of a review procedure in a regulated environment. A progress review that merely records deviations should therefore not be confused with a genuine reassessment of priorities.
A practical check in Bâle
Within SHR’s “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, one possible exercise is to test a priorities review before the planned midpoint of a Basel project, whether in pharma, life sciences, Rhine logistics or international R&D. The team records its priorities before the review, the changes agreed, their rationale and their intended translation into the schedule, without bypassing required approvals. At the next milestone, it calculates the proportion of agreed changes actually incorporated into the schedule, together with the time between each decision and the corresponding update. These measures check whether the review genuinely changes time allocation; they do not, on their own, demonstrate improved performance. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Basel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Basel
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