Archive of Prioritization Articles

Prioritization is about maximizing the value you provide to your customers. When you have multiple sets of customers with different priorities, what do you do? You could try and find the lowest-common-denominator, and please everyone a little bit. But that would be the wrong thing to do - by trying to please everyone, you fail to delight anyone.

Instead of

Prioritize the present when planning your product. Neglecting the future is almost as bad as over-emphasizing it. The key is to incorporate your plans for the future correctly by making them play second fiddle to the present needs of your market. Serve both today and tomorrow - but prioritize today.

Do you recognize this early logo from Amazon.com? Future Now has a great article detailing how Amazon evolved their “add to shopping cart” implementation. From reviewing this summary of the evolution of one feature, we can see that Amazon decided there was value in reinvention. The improved the way their product did something over time. Have you?

Learning how to write use cases can be tough, but it is simple compared to the balancing act of determining which use cases to write and how to manage the expectations of all the stakeholders that are involved. It can be a difficult balancing act to prioritize use cases to assure that you meet the goals of the business while satisfying the needs of the users.

Roger Burlton, of the Process Renewal Group, gave an excellent presentation Monday morning at the 10th annual International Business Rules Group: Developing a Business Process Architecture and Program of Change. A lot of good stuff about how to define, develop, and manage processes. One idea in his presentation was particularly compelling - that of driving process improvement strategy based on stakeholders. This approach looks at how much benefit the stakeholders can get from the improvement, and how much pain the current process causes them. A very compelling strategic prioritization tool.

I am a big fan of boxes and arrows, but this time, Jeffrey Davidson found a great article by Dan Willis before I did, and told me about it. Thanks Jeffrey! The article is about how to deal with the what and how of requirements and design - and it provides some really sage advice. But what got my attention was the lack of prioritization of requirements in his example.

Microsoft has a product called Zune that is a competitor to the Apple iPod. They just recently announced their second release - the new version of the Zune. Since Apple already dominates that market, Microsoft qualifies as a follower - how are they approaching the introduction of a new product to compete with an 800 lb. gorilla?

We all know the story about the emperor’s new clothes. I’ve been thinking about prioritization and scheduling, and as far as I know, no one is promoting that we maximize value - they (and we) have been promoting that we do the most valuable stuff first. Doing the most valuable things first does not result in getting value the fastest. In this article, we show why not.

What makes the best gadgets great? An understanding of goals and attention to design details. When we take a step back from writing requirements about software, and think about gadgets and goals - the perspective can help us write better requirements and make better prioritization decisions.

The second release of nexus went live today (build 127). It included the top features from our prioritized list published yesterday. This enabled the next use case from our first prioritized list of use cases - searching the articles. We also took this opportunity to refactor part of the user interface - adding pagination of articles and search results, and reworking the presentation of the article content based on user feedback.

In this article we look at the content of the third alpha release of nexus.