Prioritizing Work

Craft Methodology

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For quick navigation in the video, here are some times:

0:00  Intro

3:11  The Questions

18:26 Team Questions 

19:05 Settings

22:14 Results

25:41 Results Expanded 

36:27 Outro

Are you building the right thing?

I’ve seen many times where teams are spending time on good features when they could have been working on great features. A few select reasons from many reasons you may see this are:

• The developer has limited exposure to customer benefits

• Team could use greater understanding of the target experience

• Poor communication between or from stakeholders

• Less focus on building for customers

• It is a passion project for the team

To be used as a meeting exercise, I created a calculator to show how valuable a feature, maintenance, infrastructure or pipeline work is for a project. The calculator does a good job showing if the work:

• Is required

• Is risky

• Is too large

• Is better to buy or license instead of building ourselves

• Is potentially a distinctive competency

• Has good ROI

• Has a workaround that is better than the feature

• Is something we are confident is

• What priority number it should be

The intent is not to have this calculator actually pick what we should do. The intent is to ensure we have thought through what we intend to do, have the ability to answer all of the questions about it, and have had a chance to talk about it.

In the next video of this series I’ll start stepping through exactly how the calculator determines everything.

Lastly, A note for the eagle eyed of the bunch, I’ve squished the small bug that you might see.

Thanks