Tag Archives: Prioritization

Interrelation Digraphs As Prioritization Tool

Prioritization can be hard, especially when we’re dealing with a lot of variables. Peter Abilla, at shmula.com takes a fairly esoteric tool (interrelation digraphs) and applies it as a prioritization tool. Opthamologists have learned that they can’t show us a bunch of blurry images and have us tell them which one looks the best, and then prescribe a corrective lense. They have to ask us “Is it better like this? Or better like this?” Peter’s approach does the same thing, but with a quantitative edge.

Prioritize With Poe – Halloween Fun

A little Halloween fun – an homage to Edgar Allen Poe describing this week’s issue triage and prioritization meeting.

Wants and Needs

When a client asks for a capability or feature – is it a want or a need? How do we prioritize them?

Cost Reduction Potential

All process improvements are not created equal. How should we select which processes (or process steps) to improve? How do we approach this for a really large migration project? Start with understanding the potential for improvement and then narrow it down from there.

Make Your Meetings 60% More Effective

While effective meetings may not be the key to success, ineffective meetings are inarguably one of the largest time wasters in corporations. Applying these tips before, during, and after meetings will make us much more effective.

Product Differentiation vs. Product Improvement

Build a better mousetrap. That’s what they used to say. But that doesn’t differentiate our products. Everyone is doing better, we need to do different.

Magic square of innovation

Marcus Ting-A-Kee has a post on his blog with a great magic square diagram describing a perspective on innovation. This framework provides us with an easy way to assess the potential impact of an innovation. We will…

* show how to use the square
* look at some example innovations
* and use the square to prioritize requirements

Prioritizing requirements – three techniques

Now that we’ve gathered all these requirements, how do we determine which ones to do first?

The less we know about our client’s business, the more the requirements appear to be equivalent. We’ll talk about three different approaches to prioritizing requirements.

1. Classical. Let stakeholders assign priority to the requirements.
2. Exhaustive. Explore every nuance of prioritization and its application to requirements.
3. Value-based. Let ROI drive the decisions. (hint: this is the best one – scroll down if you’re in a real hurry)
4. [bonus]. A look at how 37signals prioritizes features for their products.