Let’s start with a plan: The Roadmap
It’s our opinion that all companies do better with a plan, but how do you start that plan in the first place?
Most companies we work with aren’t starting from zero. They have a significant list of projects that they want to get accomplished already as well as a list of yet-to-be captured projects floating about the organization. Start by gathering one master list of all projects to be considered for the organization roadmap. These projects may be well known or still somewhat obscure but it’s best to get everything on the table as best you know today. The roadmap evolves and new project suggestions can be added regularly.
When establishing the list of projects, size matters. Ensure that project suggestions are large enough that they warrant the overhead of discussion with key influencers and decision makers as well as future project management tracking.
Once you have this master list, how do you prioritize these projects without investing a tremendous amount of time and energy getting into the details on each and every one?
The Low Hanging Fruit Method
We’ve found the easiest way to evaluate projects from a high level is to only use two metrics at first:
Business Impact: Low, Medium, High, Critical
Business Impact is a swag metric at this stage that simply groups projects into how valuable we think accomplishing this project would be to the organization. To avoid the bias that can come from such broad classifications, we ask influencers and decision makers of the roadmap to ask these four questions to decide on Business Impact:
Will accomplishing this project generate more revenue for the company?
Will accomplishing this project reduce cost for the company?
Will accomplishing this project mitigate risk for the company?
Will accomplishing this project establish a new capability for the company?
If the influencers and decision makers of the roadmap can make cases in these areas, consensus is much easier to achieve to decide Business Impact.
Level of Effort: Minimal, Low, Medium, High, Difficult
The level of effort is another swag metric at this stage asked of only those who would be knowledgeable about the true level of effort to accomplish the project. This is not intended to be an exhaustive research effort at this stage but should, using individuals capable of identifying what the most challenging aspect to a project would be, allow a high level discussion to gain consensus.
The level of effort will almost certainly require domain and technical questions to be asked that are specific to the project. Sometimes projects are fairly known bodies of work and can be identified with Minimal, Low, Medium, and High levels of effort. However, there are times when a project is in it’s entirety, boldly going into the unknown and we may simply identify the project as “Difficult” indicating a known risk of uncertainty.
Prioritization
Now that we have collected projects into a single list, identified their business impact and level of effort, we can stack rank projects based on high business value and low level of effort. We refer to these projects as low hanging fruit.
Gradually, we adjust the prioritization to biasing business impact with greater and greater levels of effort.
Are there caveats, absolutely. Sometimes dependencies will creep in as hard as we may try to keep projects autonomous. At other times, fixed dates, contract commitments, or outside influencers will force our hand to adjust a project ahead of it’s natural order but as long as the team understands and agrees to this we can all rally around a plan.
The plan can and will change, but that’s ok.
Are there other tried and true approaches to prioritization? Of course, however, we believe strongly in the power of momentum and showing the individuals working on projects success early helps fuel teams to accomplish a project and move on to the next one with vigor. If you believe this approach is not right for your organization we encourage you to experiment until you find the right mix. A few additional approaches you can use for inspiration include:
- Business impact prioritization regardless of effort.
- Lowest effort prioritization regardless of business impact.
- Dependency based prioritization.
- Resource-skill optimized prioritization.
Fairview Can Help
Fairview allows you to capture all of your projects into one place with as much (or as little) detail as you have at the time. Simple statuses such as Backlog, Todo, In Progress, On Hold, and Done make it easy to see what projects are active and which are being considered in the roadmap.
Within each project added to Fairview, you can easily specify Business Impact and Level of Effort, giving you a quick, high level approach to prioritization of the organization roadmap. It is at this same time you can add project objectives and key results if it helps to determine the business impact.
Drag and drop of projects in the roadmap enable decision makers to readjust to handle for exceptions or dependencies within the project order.
Finally, as projects evolve to include planned resources, cost, margin, revenue, or ROI; all up to date information and historical changes are captured to keep everyone in the know.
If you would like to try out Fairview, please join us with a free account and give us your feedback: beta.fairviewapp.com/signup
