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🟨 Entry in planning
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The challenge of prioritization in growing service companies
Digital service providers often face a dilemma: with increasing success, the number of customers grows - and with it the number of open tasks. A state of permanent overload quickly arises in which not all requests can be dealt with immediately. It is then no longer enough to simply work through tasks - a decision must be made as to what should be completed first.
But prioritization is complex:
- Every customer considers their project to be particularly important.
- Team members have different assessments of urgency.
- Resources - especially the time of specialists - are limited.
Leadtime therefore offers four integrated tools with which teams can systematically plan and prioritize: Big Picture, Pools, Pipelines and Stacks. Together, they form a multi-stage process to structure workloads and distribute tasks efficiently.
The four planning tools at a glance
1. big picture: clarifying priorities at project level
In the Big Picture, account managers (e.g. project managers) work together with the customer to prioritize all tickets within a project. Tickets are displayed visually as cards and can be sorted according to importance - from left (important) to right (less urgent). This creates a shared understanding: What is most important to the customer at the moment?
Ideal for:
- Support projects with continuous requests
- Coordination with the customer
- Clarity about "what comes first?"
2. pools: Overview for individual project managers
An account manager is usually responsible for several customers at the same time. The pool view therefore shows all open tickets for which an employee is "responsible" - across all projects. Tickets can also be sorted by importance and intermediate goals can be defined here.
Ideal for:
- Weekly planning for account managers
- Planning meetings with the team leader
- Overview of your own task portfolio
3rd pipeline: Global resource distribution in the team
The pipeline is a central planning tool for managers and teams. The available specialists (e.g. developers) are planned with tasks here. The view shows a calendar week in 15-minute segments - and makes it clear which tickets are being processed by whom and when.
The pipeline is often maintained jointly in the weekly team meeting: Account managers suggest tasks, the team leader makes the final selection.
Ideal for:
- Precise weekly planning for developers
- Avoidance of overload
- Balancing customer requirements and internal strategy
4. stacks: The personal work plan for specialists
Specialists receive their assigned tasks via the so-called stacks - an individual Kanban board that takes over the tasks from the pipeline sequence. The tickets appear in the "To do" column and are processed one after the other. If there are any queries, a ticket can be moved to the "Obtain feedback" column.
Ideal for:
- Concentrating on one task at a time
- Avoiding interruptions
- Working through the weekly plan independently