Is focusing on one project beneficial even when project priorities can't be quantified?

Question

Small internal IT department that assists all of a company's departments.

Each department has projects that each are 'priority 1' - the departments and executive team are unwilling to strictly prioritize projects.

Because of this, the argument was made that IT should not focus on one project, since multiple projects must be highest priority and therefore must be done simultaneously.

This strikes me as flawed reasoning, but I was unable to articulate exactly how/why.

Am I wrong - is it actually a bad idea for IT to work as a team instead of multiple individual developers on multiple projects?

Or is it still better for IT to work as a team and swarm one project at a time? If so - why?

Answer 1

That's so situational--and sounds like poor project management. It sounds like the PM needs to revisit and take task urgency, value, and level of effort (LOE) into consideration and reprioritize. Even if it's the difference between 1.1 and 1.2, that should be the outcome you're looking for. Multitasking has never proven to be an effective form of project management, let alone personal productivity.

Answer 2

This would depend on so many factors that it is hard to judge for outsiders I think. If you have enough people to work on several projects at the same time, that might be a good idea. But if you can work with several people on one project and deliver that sooner that is also a good idea.

If I was in the IT department I would make an estimation on the needed resources to finish the projects, cross reference that with the availability of the resources and if not done by others, I would also try to identify dependencies between projects. With this information I would choose which project(s) to work on.