Prioritization is easy!
You think prioritization is hard? Not at all! Just say “everything is top priority!” and watch magic unfold. At least that’s the most popular approach. Unfortunately it doesn’t work.
Let me walk you through a better way. Please note the links to separate blog posts detailing the various concepts throughout this text. If you read them all you should be done within the hour! Add a couple of years to deeply understand it all and then convince the rest of the organization that you’re not crazy, and you’re good to go!
The first thing you need to realize is the fact that you can’t do everything at once. For people who don’t get this, prioritization isn’t a very important concept. Why choose when you can have it all?
Another good idea is late commitment, meaning that you prefer to talk about options as long as possible. Things you haven’t started are things you could do if you wanted to. If you have capacity, and nothing else on your plate that is more important or valuable. The point is, try not to think of things you haven’t started as things you must do.
A third concept is to balance thinking with doing. Many organizations front-load their process. They have endless capacity to come up with ideas, analyze them and detail them. The capacity to actually build stuff? Not so endless. All your pretty requirement specifications are obsolete before anyone gets around to reading them. If your backlog is a black hole where good ideas go to die, you have this problem.
If you got all that figured out, it’s time to think about what it means when you say something “has priority”. What does it mean when we indicate that a task or project has the priority “low”, “medium”, “high”? Nothing. That’s what it means. Everyone knows we’ll never get close to solving anything defined as “low”, and even “medium” is a long shot. So what do we do? We mark everything as “high” of course. Then we call that process “prioritization”. It’s funny because it’s true..
Classes of service is one way to make better sense of our priorities than just marking everything as “high”. We can discuss expected service levels. We can discuss actual deadlines like compliance requirements, and what happens if we do not deliver. We can stop creating artificial deadlines for stuff that don’t really have one.
Ready to get more advanced? Prioritize based on the lost opportunity caused by delaying other activities. When you accept that you have limited capacity, you can discuss the consequence of choice. Don’t base your priority solely on the cost of the task in front of you. What is the cost of delaying the other options? Trying to calculate this quickly gets complicated and theoretical. The jury is out on the value of this. What does have value is to at least start thinking about the cost of not doing something, as opposed to blindly focusing on the cost of doing. It’s a shift in perspective that helps you consider value and potential.
Understanding all these concepts takes time. Luckily there’s an easy way to get started with all this. That is to ask a simple question: What is the most important thing right now? Preferrably one thing, maximum three. Forget about ranking the next 100 things on your list. When you know that, we need find a way to figure out if you’re right. We want to avoid spending 18 months on your most important project, and then find out it wasn’t as awesome as we assumed.
That brings us to our final idea: Vertical slicing. Figure out how to deliver small, working increments of your most important thing. How can we confirm that it is indeed important, and/or that it does indeed deliver the value you think it will? Frequent delivery will keep our options open and our flexibility high. It allows us to change our priorities if needed, without waiting ages for the previous thing to finish.
If you understand and implement everything referenced in this post — you’ll be better at prioritization than most companies out there. As most things worth doing: Easy in theory, hard in practice.
Good luck!
