We are small growing company with demanding IT needs. As the company grows, new business logic needs to implemented to accommodate the growth and the existing system needs to be fixed which has a lot of shortcomings. In short there are a lot of things to be done.
The prob that I face now is there are too many priority changes every day. We have 2 to 3 top priority items on certain days. On most day I have at least one or 2. With so much priorities changes I am in the middle of priority and another priority comes, forcing me to leave the current one as it is. Further the operation are not fully aware of how complex some reports are which can easily take months if not week. I completed one within a week with all these priority changes everyday and got hit on because I was two days late.
The IT department is sort of under attack. There is an impression that things are not getting done in time and that even the quality of work is low. I am the only developer with an IT manager (new)? I am responsible for all IT works. That means any issue with our software (as we grow we have increasing issues), all reports, analysis, new functionality. There are literally 10 projects in pipeline all priority one. But I cannot work on any of those item but new priority 1 items come every day. As a developer what can I do to improve my image as well as my department. Lately what happened is that the operation is not willing to test anything on time while they blame IT for the problem. They even stopped respond go my email even though I have been extremely helpful to them. I am concerned that being too nice is actually too bad? What can I do elevate IT image as well as mine in front of operations. Note that operation is the key role in our company. And yes we are hiring new developers. But it might be a couple of weeks.
What can I do to deal with too many changing priorities where I can't get one thing completed and another one comes in?