negotiate-work-priorities

name	negotiate-work-priorities
category	get-hired
description	Resolve competing workplace demands by making capacity, value, risk, dependencies, and tradeoffs explicit. Use when commitments exceed available time or conflict across stakeholders.

negotiate-work-priorities

Do not accept incompatible commitments and hope. Bring decision-makers a clear view of capacity and consequences.

Procedure

1. Inventory requested outcomes, owners, deadlines, effort ranges, dependencies, risk, and the authority behind each request.
2. Separate fixed constraints from preferences and unverified urgency.
3. Estimate available capacity after operations, support, leave, and existing commitments.
4. Identify collisions, sequencing constraints, minimum viable scope, and the cost of interruption.
5. Build options that vary scope, date, quality, resources, or order; state the consequence of each.
6. Meet the relevant decision-maker with a recommendation and the evidence behind it.
7. Confirm what starts, stops, moves, or changes, including who accepts each consequence.
8. Update plans and notify affected stakeholders through the agreed channel.
9. Revisit when assumptions change rather than absorbing new work silently.

Failure plan

• Do not label every senior request mandatory without reconciling authority.
• Never reduce safety, legal, privacy, accessibility, or quality gates without authorized risk acceptance.
• If stakeholders cannot resolve a cross-team conflict, escalate the decision with neutral options.
• Do not retaliate against requesters or hide unplanned work.

Done

• Demand and capacity are reconciled in a shared, dated view
• The selected tradeoff and rejected alternatives are recorded
• Plans, owners, stakeholders, and acceptance criteria reflect the decision