Archive of Prioritization Articles

February 28th, 2008

Is Your Product Improving?

amazon logo

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?

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February 4th, 2008

Use Case Management is a Tough Balancing Act

balancing act

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.

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October 25th, 2007

Stakeholder Value-Delivery Matrix

Primary stakeholder in the matrix

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.

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October 22nd, 2007

Why Prioritization Matters

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.

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October 8th, 2007

Fast Follower Product Strategy: Microsoft Zune

gorilla
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?

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July 31st, 2007

Prioritization and Value Maximization

emperor's clothes

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.

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June 19th, 2007

Gadgets And Goals

shuffle

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.

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May 22nd, 2007

Nexus – Third Alpha Release Prioritization

allen wrench

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.

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May 21st, 2007

Nexus – Next Round of Prioritization

remote control

The next build of nexus starts today as our agile project continues. Let us know what stuff you think is most important for this release, as part of our prioritization.

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May 18th, 2007

APR: Process Deviation?

double parking sign

Rolf presented a valid critique and some questions on our previous article announcing the launch of nexus. I started writing a long response, and realized it would work well as an article for analysis of our process over the last month. Here it is.

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