How can you prioritize critical project features with limited resources?

Prioritizing project features with limited resources is vital. Define a clear goal, involve stakeholders, rank features by importance, and adapt based on feedback. Execute in priority order with an agile approach, monitoring and adapting for success.

Prioritizing critical project features with limited resources involves assessing impact, urgency dependencies and customer wants. Identify key functionalities that align with project goals, consider potential risks, and focus on high-impact, low effort tasks first. Regularly reassess priorities based on evolving needs and resource availability. All said and done, it is important to align customers with the set priorities.

Begin with the end in mind, as they say. I've learned that before we even think about prioritising features, we must have a crystal-clear vision. Think of this as setting your project's North Star. What problem are we solving? What are the benefits we expect? And most importantly, how does this align with our organisation's strategic objectives? When you have this clarity, not only does it guide your feature prioritisation, but it also becomes a powerful tool to communicate the project's value proposition to stakeholders. I've seen many projects delayed in getting off the ground because the detail of the delivery is considered before the higher level objectives of the project.

Defining the goals and vision of a project is fundamental for understanding its future. In setting a goal, you must first understand the limitations and scope of the company, from the daily software they use, the personnel available for the project, to the strategic alliances in place, as all of this can contribute to establishing a more precise goal. Furthermore, when selecting the vision, one must consider: What is the purpose of this project? What will be achieved upon project completion? How long will the project remain active? Where will this project take the company? Once all of this is taken into account, we can have a clear perspective to define a more precise goal and vision.

Prioritization should be an ongoing process that may require revisiting and adjusting your priorities as the project evolves. Adapting to changing circumstances and making data-driven decisions can help maximize the value of your limited resources. It would be crucial to define the project's objectives, identify crucial features, assess resource constraints, encourating input from all stakeholders, analyzing cost benefits & impact, prioritization framework, including collaborative decision making, applying agile approach, mitigating risks, having regular reviews and adaptations, ensuring clear communication and monitoring progress at all times.

This step is all about building a robust roadmap. I've found that involving key stakeholders is paramount. Interviews, workshops, user stories – these tools are your allies. When you have clients, end-users, sponsors, and experts actively participating in feature identification, you ensure that your priorities are grounded in real-world needs. It's about fostering a shared vision among all parties involved, which is fundamental to successful project execution. A key skill here is in translating and negotiating between stakeholders, decision makers, subject matter experts and resources. Maintaining alignment is key.

To identify the project features and requirements, one of the best practices that I have been used is made to different diagrams just starting the project, which are diagrams of Gantt and flowcharts. The combination will make the people involved realize what the project needs, some pitfalls that may happen in the future, and all the little details of the project. Also, the good thing about that is that the two diagrams are easy to explain and read, so will help everybody in the project understand every aspect faster.

One unique way to prioritize critical project features with limited resources is to use the “Buy a Feature” game. This game involves creating a list of features and assigning each feature a price. The team members are then given a limited budget and asked to “buy” the features they think are most important. This approach can help you identify which features are most valuable to your team and stakeholders.

Like in most things, the 80/20 rule applies here. You'll have potentially hundreds of features, but 20% of them will delivery 80% of the reward. There isn't necessarily a correlation between effort and reward. Sometimes a small change has the biggest impact. Spend more time working out which will be the impactful features. Normally people don't spend enough time doing this and therefore waste a lot of time building low value features which delay the delivery of the project.

One way to separate out is based on the scope and impact. The bigger the scope more impact it will have on the business, and users. Also one needs to take into account the certainty, uncertainty, and complexity while defining the scope which helps to exemplify the rationale behind scoping. Adapting to these helps in separating out the features based on their priority and rank them out.

The heart of the matter – categorisation and ranking. I've explored various techniques like MoSCoW and the Kano model. What's essential here is the art of ruthless prioritisation. Must-haves are your project's lifeline, should-haves are the game-changers, could-haves add finesse, and won't-haves? Well, they're the distractions you can do without. Prioritise based on impact and feasibility; sometimes, less is more, and focusing on those must-haves ensures you're delivering core value efficiently.

Sometimes I suggest to solve not plane but volumetric problem. The third dimension is a cost. We should take into account not only technical beauty but also money. May be our estimation of one schould-have feature is equal to two or three could-have. And may be their overall value is higher than individually and even greater than schould-have feature.

In my experience, the best practice in this situation of validating and adjusting the project features is to use the method DMAIC. Because it will help you understand better what the stakeholders want and will make a project lifecycle of validation more flow and exact for the project features and requirements.

In simple words, I will use the method DMAIC again where a will use: Define: Diagrams of Gantt and Flowcharts Measure: KPI and Vision Analyze: Inspection sheets, Histograms, Pareto chart and Scatter plots Improve Cause – Effect Diagrams Control: Control charts X-R

Simply to put in 3 steps: Consider the risks and benefits of each feature > Get input from stakeholders > Be flexible Some features may be more risky than others, but they may also have the potential to provide greater benefits. You need to weigh the risks and benefits of each feature carefully before making a decision. Getting input from stakeholders can help you identify the features that are most important to them. It can also help you get buy-in for your decisions. The reality is that things change, and your project plan may need to change with them. Be flexible and willing to adapt your priorities as needed.

é preciso compreens?o do que cada projeto apoio nos objetivos estratégicos, no sentido de alinhar estrategicamente os projetos entre si. Após isso, é necessário alinhamento com as partes interessadas, buscando negocia??o para melhor aplicar o uso dos recursos.