Tips for Selecting Priorities for Tasks and Projects
An organization should start the correction of its systemic software-development-problems, with simple steps. The first move an institution should make is to implement and follow a prioritization scheme. Yet, that company might not know how to pick a preference for a job or an undertaking. It could use its gut, but it might not feel confident in its instincts. Those hunches can be verified against some suggestions, which help an organization know it is on the right path.
The Tips
The clues below are only heuristics. They are not a fully developed out classification system. To develop that approach, read The Principles of Product Development Flow, which has scads of details on how to build a methodology for arranging an institution’s work. A company only receives, from the following hints, guidelines as to whether it is categorizing the priorities of its jobs and projects sensibly, not a complete methodology.
A business should determine its preferences, using the factors listed below.
Whether an item has a required date and how far out that time is (a required date is when the cost of delay kicks in)
The cost of delaying a job or a project (this could mean savings missed or money that must be returned)
The benefit of completing that work (this could the value of the contract, business delivered, or the savings achieved)
The scope required to finish the task or undertaking (this typically means man-hours)
The length of time an entry has been waiting to receive resources
Those aspects are used to form heuristics to demonstrate the common appearance of items in each priority.
A listing the high-preference category can be identified through one or more of the following guidelines. If more records meet these protocols than the classification has slots, then an institution must make a choice as to which entry it places into the group, placing the others in the lower sections.
Required date that is close and a non-trivial cost of delay
Target time within sight or closer that has a large price for missing it
Large scope and a necessary window where the expense for being outside of it is sizeable
Very large benefit of completion
Waiting a very, very, very long time to get resources
A record in the low-priority category can be spotted through one or more of the following heuristics.
Required date that date is very far away and a modest-or-smaller scope
Necessary timeframe and a very low cost of delay
Essential timeline that is far way and a very small scope
Very low benefit of finishing and a tiny cost of missing the required period
No required date (no cost of delay) and a low advantage of finishing
Does not fit into the medium or high categories
Any item that does not belong in the other two classifications should be in the medium one.
The high section is done by an organization first. It works on the low region second. Once those areas are done, it places any entries not in those categories, in the medium one. If that category becomes full, its spillover is placed into the low classification.
Curated Content and Authors
DataKitchen describes how DevOps and DataOps differ.
We wrote an article that describes how data and domain knowledge contribute to the development of a strategy.
We penned a column that argues that software development projects fail for the same reasons ones in other domains do.
Thomas Betts is a software engineer specialized in architecture and system-level decisions. He has two decades of experience and a Master of Science in Systems Engineering from Johns Hopkins.
Wrap-up
An institution interested in further details on prioritization should subscribe to this newsletter. If it interested in correcting its systemic software-development-problems, it should read the Software Development Journal. It covers the topics parallel to the ones in this bulletin, and it sometimes expands on them. For subjects related to creating methodologies more broadly, it should read the Strategy Construction Journal. It should follow ExperTech Insights on Twitter, if it likes this newsletter.