You're revamping your IT strategy with agile methodologies. How do you effectively prioritize tasks?

Don’t just prioritize tasks - prioritize outcomes. In an agile environment, the focus shouldn't be on merely ticking off tasks from a backlog but on ensuring that each task drives meaningful business results. Shift from task-based prioritization to outcome-based prioritization, where the value delivered to the customer or the business becomes the primary criterion. This approach ensures that your agile efforts are always aligned with strategic goals and deliver tangible benefits. Tip: Prioritize outcomes over tasks to ensure your agile strategy consistently delivers high-impact results aligned with business objectives.

Make sure your entire team is trained in agile methods, that includes stakeholders. Stakeholders need to understand what to expect from introducing agile methods, and your team needs to understand what it means to deliver a steady diet of done.

The Scrum Guide has been clear on this for years: a single, empowered Product Owner maintains an ordered Product Backlog, representing and balancing the needs of all the stakeholders. While this is written into the Scrum guide, it makes sense no matter what methodology you use. Organisations that manage to implement this seem to do far better than ones that don't, in my experience.

I don't think I've ever had a good experience with MoSCoW prioritisation, unfortunately. It invariably results in everything not marked "must" being descoped, leaving you with a single unprioritised mess. I'd much rather product owners and other stakeholders estimated the relative value of each backlog item, used the same estimating techniques they expect developers to use for estimating the cost.

Don’t just prioritize by value - prioritize by risk mitigation. In an agile revamp, it’s easy to focus on high-value tasks, but addressing high-risk areas first can save your project from potential pitfalls. By prioritizing tasks that eliminate the most significant risks to project success—whether technical, operational, or strategic—you safeguard the project's overall integrity while still delivering value. This approach ensures that your agile strategy is resilient and adaptable. Tip: Focus on mitigating risks as your top priority to protect project success while delivering high-value outcomes.

Set priorities in accordance with business value. Too many times IT departments are not aligned with the business and business stakeholders don't understand what table stakes need to be in place to achieve business value. Communication is key as is an all-inclusive review of business and technical priorities.

Include your entire team in refinement and sprint planning sessions. Make sure that everyone's voice is heard, so that all technical dependencies are considered and complexities are properly scored when assigning point values to stories, sprints, and epics.

Customer feedback is important when assessing if you are hitting the mark in terms of delivering value with your deliverables. Make sure to offer frequent opportunities for customers to provide feedback, at least at the end of each sprint.

Getting customer/user feedback and incorporating it into your backlog prioritisation is such a fundamental thing that I'm always surprised when it doesn't happen. It's important to do that right though - just asking people what they want is a terrible strategy; as Steve Jobs said, people often don't know what they want until you show it to them. Building feedback mechanisms and A/B testing into your product and process can be a really good way to approach this.

Don’t just iterate - integrate. Instead of treating each sprint as a standalone effort, prioritize tasks by how well they integrate with the broader strategic vision. Use each iteration to review and adjust and ensure that every completed task seamlessly contributes to the larger objectives. Focusing on integration at every step ensures that your agile strategy isn’t just adaptive but also cohesive, driving consistent progress toward your ultimate goals. Tip: Prioritize tasks by their ability to integrate into the bigger picture, ensuring each iteration builds momentum toward your strategic vision.