Prioritization and its types

Prioritization and its types

Prioritization is the process of determining the relative importance of an object (information, tasks, requirements, etc.) based on a preliminary assessment of its significance, risks, complexity of implementation or other clear criteria. In turn, the discipline of Project Management also considers prioritization in the context of portfolio management, when it is necessary to form a balanced set of enterprise projects in accordance with its strategy or financial indicators. It also takes into account the investment period (short-term, medium, long-term), forecasts for risks and profitability, and other organizational and technical aspects

Thus, we can distinguish 2 levels of prioritization:


  • Strategic, when, for example, a director of digitalization or a C-manager (CEO, CTO, CFO or other senior executive) forms a portfolio of projects, defining a long-term program for enterprise development or change management within the framework of digital transformation;
  • Tactical, when a business analyst or project manager determines the importance of individual tasks or requirements for a projected solution, for example, a consumer demand forecasting system based on Big Data and Machine Learning technologies.


Prioritization is not an easy task, because there are too many things to take into account, and in general, “all our tasks are important.” There is a temptation not to set any priorities at all. Because of this, following the tendency of our brain to be lazy, we do first of all the simplest tasks (the brain wants a free dose of dopamine), scoring on the really important ones. As a result, business suffers.

Prioritization helps:


  • increase team productivity,
  • stay on the right track,
  • manage time and other resources more efficiently,
  • and meet deadlines.


So let’s see what needs to be done to effectively prioritize tasks in the team.

Where to start if everything seems important?

Almost all methods of prioritizing tasks are based on three parameters: importance, urgency and complexity. Importance is the value of a task for a business, the degree of influence on its success. Urgency is the need to respond immediately. The difficulty is how labor — intensive it will be to implement the task.

It is in determining these three parameters and choosing what to do in what order that prioritization consists.

1. Put all the tasks in one list

First, the most important thing is to create a list where you dump all the tasks that the team will have to do (in development, such a list is called a backlog). Do not forget to decompose complex tasks, so that it will be easier to establish the dependencies of tasks on each other later.

You can make a list of tasks by gathering the whole team in a meeting room and sticking stickers on the board, or you can collect everything in some project and task management system.

2. Specify the time frame

Then you need to specify deadlines for tasks, on the result of which not only your team, but also someone else depends. For example, if you are doing a client project, a lot of processes on the client side will depend on the timing of its implementation, which means it will be very, very difficult to postpone such tasks.

For other tasks, it would also be good to specify deadlines, but here everything will depend on their importance for business. Therefore…

3. Evaluate the importance of the tasks

You and your team probably want the work you do to move the business forward. That’s why you need to look carefully at each task and ask a few questions:


  • Why do it at all?
  • What result will it give?
  • What will it affect in business?
  • Is it possible to make money on this?
  • Do users/clients need this?


Let’s look at different prioritization techniques with you:

If you have several important and urgent features in your implementation plan, how do you understand which one to start first?

This important issue of prioritization is at the heart of all product management. The fee for choosing the wrong option may be too high.

RICE method

RICE is a method of prioritizing product ideas and features. The abbreviation includes 4 factors that a product manager can safely use to evaluate and prioritize product features:


  • Reach
  • Impact — impact
  • Confidence — confidence in your assessment of coverage, impact and labor costs
  • Effort — labor costs


To get a RICE score, you need to combine these factors.

ICE method

The ICE prioritization method was coined by Sean Ellis, who is known for authoring the term Growth Hacker.

ICE was originally intended to prioritize growth experiments. Later, ICE was also used to prioritize features.


  • Influence shows how much your idea will positively affect the key indicator that you are trying to improve.
  • Ease of implementation is about simplicity of implementation. This is an assessment of how much effort and resources are required to implement this idea.
  • Confidence shows how confident you are in the impact assessments and ease of implementation.


The Eisenhower Matrix

This technique helps to quickly sort out the to-do list, even if there are a lot of them. Outwardly, everything looks extremely simple — we look at the list of tasks and answer two questions for each one.

Is it important?

Yes/No

Is it urgent?

Yes/No


The Kano Model

The Kano Model is a method used to assess the emotional reaction of consumers to certain characteristics of products. The results obtained with its help allow you to manage customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Kano Principles

The Kano model has become a real discovery in the field of research on ways to measure delight. Japanese scientist and consultant Noriaki Kano criticized the generally accepted theories that it is necessary to maintain customer loyalty by responding to their complaints and expanding the most popular characteristics of the product.

Kano suggested that consumer loyalty is interconnected with the emotional response to product characteristics and identified five different reactions — from dislike to admiration.

The WBS method

Оf the WBS project ( Work Breakdown Structure or ISR, Hierarchical Structure of Work) is the division of the project into specific results that must be achieved to achieve the goals of the project.

Conclusion

We got acquainted with different methods of prioritization and understood what prioritization is. In the following posts we will take a detailed look at all these methods and analyze live cases.


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