“Prioritisation” is what you do to determine the things that should be done to deliver the most value at a point in time, given the constraints.

Imagine this scene:

Boss:“Is everything going to plan?”
Team: “Yes, we are focusing on the next most important thing”
Boss: “OK, that’s great. Crack on!”

Wow, wouldn’t that be a great way of working? Imagine if you only needed to focus on a few, priority things and everyone was cool with that.

Prioritisation is an essential skill for teams and organisations.

A good prioritisation process should build consensus and confidence.

Better yet, a good prioritisation process should make it safe to say ‘No’.

Tips for better prioritisation

We make prioritisation decisions hundreds of times a day and our brains are well trained to do it. And yet, when it comes to groups - couples, families, teams, organisations - it gets much more complicated and messy.

Good news! There are plenty of tools and techniques to help you overcome this.

That said, there’s no silver bullet. In the end, prioritisation decisions come down to conversation, and negotiation.

Tools help, but you need to know which ones to use and how to set them up for success.

Hopefully these tips and techniques will help do that.

Tip 1: Work out who is doing the prioritisation

Is it you and your team? Is it an external group?

Knowing who will be making the decisions influences what tools or techniques you use.

For example: if it’s just your team, you might use a simple list and ask the team to rank the items on it: 1, 2, 3, 4... Good enough.

If it’s a large, external group of stakeholders, then you might need to put some upfront structure in place (e.g. scoring criteria, scales and weightings) to allow you to have better conversations.

If you’re being wonderfully lean and user centred, then prioritisation might be heavily influenced by your users’ behaviours. Do you have the right insights and data?

Tip 2: Understand what triggers prioritisation

When you know the triggers you can create the right rituals. Is it your weekly team planning session? Is it a quarterly review of objectives? Is it a resourcing conversation?

Knowing the triggers allows you to create the right cadence and invite the right people.

Making prioritisation a regular thing, rather than a one-off, helps build consensus and ownership.

Tip 3: Make the constraints clear

Prioritisation means making trade-offs. Knowing the constraints in which you are operating is essential.

Focus the conversation on the trade-offs, rather than forcing participants to mentally model the constraints.

For example, try drawing a grid to visualise work-in-progress limits, or the number of teams available.

Tip 4: Prioritising bad ideas is a bad idea

Whatever you are prioritising, make sure the people doing it are clear about what each thing is.

Those prioritisation sessions that go around in an endless loop of “what is this thing again?” are a waste of time. Make sure the things being prioritised are easy for everyone to understand.

For example, an ‘ELMS system’ might mean something to you, but it might not mean much to others. Whilst you want some back and forth about “does this thing include [x]?” you don’t want the whole conversation to be about that.

Label things in plain language (i.e. not business-speak or jargon), or offer up pre-reading material so people can get their heads around what they are about to prioritise.

Go into the prioritisation conversation prepared.

Prioritisation techniques

Here’s just a few techniques we use, by way of an example.

2x2 grids

Whack a 2x2 grid up on the wall, or in your favourite online tool, and pick an x/y axis. Simple and adaptable. This helps you talk about each thing and where to place on the grid.

To avoid people gaming where to place things on the grid, don’t reveal what each quadrant means until the end.

Another trick is to move one of the gridlines right at the end of the conversation. For example, moving “important” axis lines upwards really does focus minds on the things that are near the top / really important. Once you’ve done this, ask participants “So these are most important things, right?” and watch them gulp :)

MoSCoW

A classic from the days of lengthy requirements documents. Even so, it’s still a useful way to whizz through a list of things and ask:

“This thing: let’s prioritise it. Is it something we…”

Must have?

Should have?

Could have?

Won’t have?

It makes a long list much shorter, very quickly. And for that, we love it.

Hat tip @jaggeree who suggested to add a constraint of 20-30% of Musts to force bargaining and trade-offs. Good idea!

Scorecards

Scorecards allow groups to agree a set of prioritisation criteria, weight them and score them. Some groups really love them because it feels like you’re doing clever maths.

We’ve found this technique most useful for scoring things against a set of accepted objectives.

Cost of Delay

This one is a favourite. It’s not an everyday prioritisation technique and it’s not for the faint-hearted but it’s a very good way of balancing ‘jam today’ vs ‘jam tomorrow’.

The fibonacci sequence is useful as scale for prioritisation exercises because it forces distribution

Prioritise delivering the smallest, most valuable things using Cost of Delay

This note was originally published on jamiearnold.com. It’s been re-published here with minor edits.

How to prioritise things