Go For The Low Effort and High Impact
Problem: One of the hardest things to do when working with a new team, is to come up with projects or goals that will move your organization forward. One of the best ways to get ideas going is through brainstorming. There are many different ways to go about brainstorming, from mind mapping, to using Design Thinking for ideation, or even scribbling out thoughts in a notebook. Those are all good ways to get ideas flowing and out on paper in some sort of structure. However, they don’t take into consideration how capable your team is to get some of those ideas done. It later becomes hard, when you start deciding not only what ideas are good but also then spending time on deciding on whether it is achievable.
Tool: High Impact, Low Effort Chart
Purpose: A High Impact, Low Effort Chart helps your team bring ideas out but in a way where you are considering the amount of effort it would take to achieve that goal or project. It is a great way to identify what projects might take a lot of time and effort to complete or what projects might take an effort to complete and might have low yield.
How to use:
Experiment:
- Get you or your team to put down their ideas or thoughts as experiences. This example was just on how a company is planning to increase their brand, communication, culture.
- Best way to go about it is to just give everyone access to the chart and write down what they think under a theme or common goal
- Then write down the details of the thought next to it
Painpoint:
- You want every solution or idea to be directly solving a problem or painpoint of the business or goal. This helps people think about ideas that have a direct impact to a problem
- List out the painpoint or problem this idea is solving
Impact:
- After you write what paintpoint you think the idea is solving, next chose the type of impact you think this idea will have on the organization, for the goals your are trying to achieve or the theme under the project.
- This is purely subjective and you make an argument on why you chose what you chose. Just think about how this idea might effect, the people inside the team, the customers you might have, or even the other stakeholders that might be involved with what you are doing.
Effort:
- After you write the Impact, then think about the amount of effort it might take to get your idea to work. Again think about what stakeholders might be involved. In addition to what types of resources and time might be needed to get this to work.
Progress Metrics:
- The last box you need to fill out is about how you are going to keep track of whether things are going well or bad
- List a few metrics that might be involved in telling you whether this idea works or not
Putting it all together
Fill out the chart to however many ideas you think you would want to go over and when it is complete, spend a session reviewing it together. Here is the best way to start.
- You want to avoid idea’s right away that are High Effort, but Low Impact these will drain your team and won’t yield a lot of progress.
- The ones you WANT to go for right away are the low hanging fruit, High Impact, Low Effort. These are easy and good wins for you and your team. It motivates your team to push forward and you can see the clear impact of the work
After you knock those two idea types out, spend sometime really deliberating on the other ones. The ones that are both High Effort and Impact should have longer conversations around them. In addition to those that have Medium Effort and Impact.
Hope this chart helped you put some ideas together and also help identify a way to prioritize which ones are a good fit for your team!
