Talking with Your Team about Engagement Management and Prioritization

In How CPA Firms Work: The Business of Public Accounting, we help professionals understand not just what they do, but how their actions contribute to the firm’s success. The following excerpt can be shared with your team to discuss how their prioritization skills are lining up with what your firm needs.

How CPA Firms Work, Chapter 2 Excerpt: Engagement Management and Prioritization

Managing the deadlines and deliverables of an engagement is a skill that’s honed over time. It requires understanding what the client needs, juggling multiple demands, setting expectations around timing and deliverables, and following through.

Be cognizant of the promises you make to your clients and your team, then communicate quickly when you see you may be off track or unable to meet your originally promised
delivery date. Better yet, build in a little buffer to the dates or times you believe you can
provide your work product and turn it in early. Underpromise and overdeliver—it’s a client service win.

Another skill to develop in engagement management is monitoring your billable hours and progress against budget. Don’t take shortcuts to meet the budget, but develop skills to get the work done properly while understanding the time expectations.

Balancing the many task requirements on your many engagements (not to mention your outside-of-work commitments) creates a prioritization puzzle. This puzzle doesn’t go away as you advance in your career. In fact, the puzzle goes from being 10 pieces to 100 to 1,000. But the picture becomes clearer as you gain experience. Early on, your prioritization puzzle might look like one of those photographs of space where it’s 99% black and 1% a zillion tiny stars. How can you tell which piece goes where? Ask. As you get more familiar with the puzzle, you’ll notice little comets and galaxies appearing that help you know where (in which time block) to put each piece.