Use WSJF To Prioritize Your Backlog

From corporate cogs to family-run startups, WSJF is the best way to organize your to-dos.

Aside from being a funny-sounding name, what’s WSJF? WSJF stand for weighted shortest job fist, and is a key principle used in large-scale organizations for getting people across multiple levels and departments to objectively agree on the company’s priorities.

Why WSJF?

Unlike other prioritization methods, WSJF covers a wide breadth of aspects that are often overlooked or entirely neglected. It allows teams and departments alike to cross-functionally prioritize without typical subjectivity or politicking.

Here’s How It Works…

Created By Bella Paolucci

1. Assess Your Impact Grade

Take a look at your task and rank it using the following criteria. Determine the task’s Business Value, Time Criticality, Risk Reduction, and Opportunity Enablement by assigning a number 1–5. The examples in each of the boxes may be altered if needed, however, they are most commonly used at face-value when evaluating each of these categories because they have the least amount of room for interpretation. Your Impact Grade is the sum of all four numbers.

2. Understand LOE

LOE, or level of effort, is how big, complicated, multi-faceted, or intricate your task is to execute. LOE is often used to establish story-point grades and is just one of many angles of understanding a task’s value. You can use the scale XS-XL correlating to numbers 1–5 the establish your LOE. You’ll then divide your Impact Grade by your LOE.

Example

Task #1 has a Business Value of 3, a Time Criticality 1, a Risk Reduction of 2, and an Opportunity Enablement of 4. This gives us an Impact Grade of 10. It has an LOE of 2. This puts our overall Priority Grade at 5.

Task #2 has a Business Value of 5, a Time Criticality of 4, a Risk Reduction of 3, and an Opportunity Enablement of 4. The Impact Grade for this task is 16. This task’s LOE is 4. That means our Priority Grade is 4.

Task #1, despite scoring lower in areas of impact, it has a much smaller LOE, which means it can be accomplished either quicker or easier, and therefore is higher in priority.

Task #2, although scoring higher in areas of impact, there are many more considerations in terms of the actual execution that require thoughtful planning, so it is prioritized beneath Task #1 as to not be in the way.

Wondering how WSJF can help you?

Reach out to me at bella@mediatriton.com or comment below. Let’s chat!