Prioritization! According to Whom? Based on What?

• – This is very important!
• – This is our top priority!
• – Oh, and… there’s this one too!
• – The security issue is critical anyway!
• – Don’t forget my project either!
• – A really urgent task came in today, can we take a look at that?!?
• – Operations called: yesterday’s release blew up, and they’ve logged a “Critical” severity bug!
• – It’s not that important, but there’s this one task, and the deadline is only 2 days away!
• – Actually that one’s done, but there was no time to test it, and they say it’s urgent. Shall we release it and look at it later if a bug comes up? I think it’ll work 🙂
• – Oh, and…
• – (Inner voice: “Enough already”) (Out loud: “Sure, let’s take a look”) 😉

You’ve probably lived through at least one of these conversations many times.

The Priority-O-Matic

Here’s a clear-cut way to calculate priorities using a mathematical method; you open up Excel… 😉

1. Priority Criteria: Define the criteria that directly affect prioritization, especially together with the Product Owners (POs). Run workshops, make the rounds of your stakeholders, and reach as broad an audience as possible. “Grand Planning” activities together with the business units work wonderfully.
2. Weighted Priority Formula: For each request, set the weight each criterion will carry in the prioritization score. (Based on your own context, considering your sphere of influence)
3. Other Factors: The prioritization score should really be a living score that changes constantly, because as time passes the urgency of some items will shift. So alongside “Value”, “Time” and of course “Cost” should affect the score too. “Time” = “Days remaining”, “Cost” = Story Point. (Other factors can of course be added as needed.)
4. Ranking: Sort by priority score from highest to lowest, and there you have it — a clear picture.

Now, when your customer asks about a piece of work:

• “Where are we with this task?”
• “Hello Ahmet Bey, according to the Priority-O-Matic your request scored “0.031914” points and ranked 8th. So we won’t be able to start it this Sprint. It’ll probably be on our agenda next Sprint. 😉
• “0.031914”? What’s that supposed to mean… 😉

Plans are nothing; planning is everything!

Plan is Nothing, Planning is Everything.

It’s important that this prioritization approach is described transparently and is simple for everyone to understand. It may look like a brilliant technique, but the effort of scoring every single piece of work can pull you off course and turn into a huge obstacle and an ordeal. Let’s not forget the principle of simplicity.

There are even paid tools that do nothing but this scoring, but I think you can build something better, tailored to your own needs:

Other Prioritization Techniques

You can find plenty of research, publications and posts about “Prioritization” methods out there. (And here’s one more ;))

I recommend the piece below by Daniel Zacarias, a product management consultant. It’s a really nice roundup of “the best techniques”.

https://foldingburritos.com/product-prioritization-techniques/

Simple Prioritization

Uh-oh! It’s getting complicated again 😉 Isn’t there a simple way to do this? There is — two example techniques are below.

1- Prioritization Matrix

If you can describe what makes a job “Urgent” and “Important”, you can quickly decide what to do with a simple matrix.

• 1-Do It Now: If it’s very urgent and very important
• 2-Do It Later: If it’s not urgent but important
• 3-Do It Last: Very urgent but not important (routine, obligatory, grunt work)
• 4-Don’t Do It: If it’s a completely unnecessary job.

So in which order do you actually do things? 3-4-2-1, perhaps 😉

https://www.process.st/prioritization-matrix/

2- Value x Cost Chart

Naturally, we try to do the work we see as most valuable with the least effort. Put this on a chart and you can come up with a solid prioritization in no time.

Below you can see a very effective prioritization session we once did in a relaxed setting.

Theory? Practice?

Theory says one thing, but practice, as life flows along (flow), says another, doesn’t it? The only thing that develops and strengthens us is the real experiences we live through. I think the whole message of agile approaches is really about maximizing learning as we gather real experience and the trial and error of those hard moments, turning it into organizational memory along the way, and so building the culture we want.

Otherwise, if you’ve read — read a lot — but haven’t found a place to apply it, that branch you believe you’re holding on to may hold up on paper and in theory, but be careful it doesn’t snap. Oh, and yes, if the overwhelming majority says something about a topic and the people you trust recommend it too, then you can embrace that knowledge, idea, suggestion or thought, believe in it, and recommend it to others.

Just like I can’t see the number in the picture below. I just asked my son again what number it says here. I can’t see it, but I believe him and the participants in my training sessions. 😉

Believing What You Can’t See!

The same goes for priority. Every department — sales, marketing, legal, security, finance, suppliers, internal audit and so on — considers its own priorities high. In fact, their very existence depends on finding high-priority (more important than being important!?!) work.

IT teams, meanwhile, serving the whole organization from the center, can end up having to take on all of these requests, and even if they do their very best, the outcome is inevitable: “IT is so slow”, “They’re asking ‘when shall we start?’ It should have been finished yesterday — yesterday!”

Do More With Less!?!

So what do we do? To keep up with everyone, let’s start all of them. If they ask: “sure thing, we’ve started on it.” “It’s in analysis right now”, “It’ll be done soon” …

• There’ll be a problem anyway, the agenda will change.
• Which task has ever been finished exactly on schedule, anyway?
• Everyone’s used to delays already.
• It’ll get cancelled, but whatever, let’s do it anyway.
• Mate, I’ve got five tasks on my plate at the same time right now. Great!?!
• Let me check, it’s the 1st of the month, OK, salary’s in. No problem, as long as there’s work 😉

If you’d like to read my earlier post on “Stop Starting, Start Finishing“:

STOP STARTING, START FINISHING

It’s very easy to suddenly find ourselves in this noisy environment. As far as we’re concerned, this is what the word “work” means. We got swept away by the flood, caught up in the flow, and became another cog in the machinery of the modern workplace.

But… wait a minute, something’s bothering me inside…

If there’s an ache inside you, you’re on the right track. Conscience won’t leave us alone. “Something’s off here.” “Isn’t what I’m doing inefficient?” “We’re doing the wrong things” “There’s no benefit, I can’t produce value” “the work gets done but isn’t used” “this one got cancelled too” “we did it but I’m not happy with it, it was slapdash, low quality”

Don’t ever say this! (or, it’s up to you ;))

• – Oh well, that’s how it’s always been and how it’ll always be…
• – This is what’s asked of me, nothing more…
• – Just say “yes” and move on, mate, don’t object…
• – Am I the one who’s going to save the company…
• – As if I get any appreciation anyway…

These are a waste of time, I’d have been better off not writing them. 😉

Change is very fast. And it certainly won’t slow down.

Given where we are now, “we need to do only the most valuable work with limited resources, and do it even faster than before.”

MVP (MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT)

So we’re looking for an MVP. (Minimum Viable Product)

Like in the picture below, we’re trying — and should be trying — to find a simple but valuable product that will satisfy our customer, one they can use and give us quick feedback on (because I want to spot opportunities for improvement early). Just as we look for an “Increment” in every Sprint in Scrum.

Like SpaceX launching a rocket almost every 2 weeks.

So, How Do You Prioritize?

Here’s what comes to mind when I think of prioritization, along with some suggestions:

An endless list of work, limited resources, budget and time, and the expectation of quality output. That’s what we live with.

The more valuable the output we can deliver, the happier and more motivated the customer and the team are — and of course me, as part of the team. Because we’re doing valuable work. We’re moving up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

As we chase “Value”, the following sequence can help with good prioritization.

INVEST & SMART

When items (PBIs) in the Backlog come into Sprint Planning, the following rules should be taken into account. The reverse is also true.

Each User Story should be independent, negotiable, and express value in its own right. Its scope should be described so that the team can estimate its cost, and it should be bite-sized, small, simple and testable. (INVEST)

In the work to be done, this piece’s place in the system should be defined, and once released, its effects should be measurable and it should generate data that allows feedback to be collected. Within a set time (Timebox), it should meet the “Definition of Done”; completing the small tasks should complete the user story, and the link between them should never be lost. (SMART)

 

XP Practices

I’m not exaggerating! XP (Extreme Programming) Practices may be one of the most important approaches on the journey of finding “Value” and reaching it.

Because it describes a software approach built on the foundations of simplicity, communication, feedback and experimentation (courage).

When you apply XP Practices, simply by working “paired” — that is, in pairs, two people together — you also break down roles and hidden hierarchies.

In this period of remote work, here’s my recommendation to everyone: “WATCH, AND LET OTHERS WATCH“.

• While working on an active task, share your screen with a colleague, or watch them work on theirs. See what happens…
• Run focused online sessions with Pomodoro — not alone, but with others again.
• When planning, each task may have 1 main owner, but at least 2 people can work on it.

 

Waste Report

Another good practice:

If you’re having trouble aligning on work, value, priorities and a shared purpose and goal, conflict over “Priorities” is a likely outcome. Teams start to feel pressure over constantly changing demands and therefore changing plans and effort, and in reaction we end up with “buffered” durations. If there’s no environment of trust, if capacity isn’t measured, then estimating, assigning SPs and being agile have lost all meaning and value. A system has been built that wrestles with managing CRs (Change Requests), and the teams crushed under this system have gotten used to “pretending” — equating agility with working harder, being “Agile” with being hasty, and running Scrum as “Waterfall”.

Culture transformation is the hardest job. To change approaches and behaviors we have to find different, sometimes radical solutions. That’s also the message of Scrum’s “Courage” value.

Below is a real example. A team that constantly churns through requests wanted to show the inefficiency, because they’d found the best way to say “the work we do always arrives as urgent, but changes at the last minute or gets cancelled outright”: the Waste report.

And what do you think happened in the end…

From the moment they started publishing this report at the end of every Sprint/Iteration, the way work arrived began to change. The business units started thinking more about INVEST & SMART. They took care to avoid efforts that would wear the team out and go to waste.

And the whole team lived in health and peace ever after. 🙂

No, no, troubles never end in life, but thankfully a shared “mindset” to solve them has now formed…

Erkan Sarıkaya

Enterprise Agile Coach

Related Posts

• Why Story Point? (SP)
• Refinement -1- From Idea to User Story
• Agile Metrics

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Author: Erkan Sarıkaya — Enterprise Agile Coach, founder of GONEX. He writes about enterprise agile transformation, Scrum and agile leadership coaching. You can learn more on the About Us page and read his other posts.