I will never forget the first time I told a boss we had to choose between which of my top three deliverable and he told me that all three were my #1 priority. I was at the stage of life where that kind of thing would make me go get drunk.

I was also at the time of life where a greasy diner breakfast would put my hangover right. I’m way to old to recover in a morning (sometimes it takes days) so now I’m more careful about getting into a triority corner.

You know the old saw: Fast, Cheap, or Good - pick any two. In reality you can only pick one but clients and circumstances often force you to produce all three.

Like with project planning, where you can only save time early, you can only avoid a triority by spotting it’s evil smell early.

For example, once I had a client trying to launch a major internet product more quickly by pinching off a division as a startup. Stop laughing, it was not my suggestion - the Bain guys sucked $2M out of them for that sterling piece of advice. So there they were, trying to coordinate an IT mentality, a corporate purchasing department at a remote location, a tricky technical product development, and a changing market.

Triority forming: late product changes, delayed hardware, and inadequate tech guys. About six months before launch I got the CEO to approve a “tiger team” to build a “prototype Release 1A” and, surprise, we ended up with a remote data center (remember Qwest?) with HUGE machines and GULF sized bandwidth. We were a dozen days after the missed initial product release in launching “Release 1A” but the in-house team took six months to turn the real release on.

Sure, the marketing guys hated me (nothing was on time, the messaging didn’t match, etc), but we avoided a triority: change the product, release it on time, and there is no hardware. All perfectly predictable if you’re paying attention, but only something you can deal with given plenty of lead time.

I suggest you consider looking ahead at your own project - are there a series of conflicting factors coming together? It’s not like inventing the next flavor of lip gloss - it’s always deadline, feature, or people related. Or all three. And marketing, sales, and corporate are always involved. Sometimes all three. Are there consultants in-house? They’re involved.

Once you see the nexus forming you can decide what to do: avoid it, bug out, or be in a position to rescue it. One thing you cannot (CAN NOT!) do is prevent it from happening. The inertia of any organization is much greater than your ability to shove people around.

Ok, you’ll try, we all do. But please have a backup plan. Remember, you can avoid, run, or be ready to fix. Hey, that is a triority of options!