A to do list can help you keep track of the tasks you need to complete. But when it comes to actually completing those tasks-that’s a different story. Here are some Agile prioritization techniques that will help make sure you get your most important work done.
Brief Introduction to Agile
Agile was created in 2001 to solve the issue of not having enough time and budget to complete all project requirements
- The flexible element in Agile is scope
- A Product Owner chooses the 10 most important requirements and works with the development team to understand what can be delivered within a fixed timeframe and on a fixed budget
Basic Agile Prioritization Techniques
Create a ranked list of priorities
- Relative prioritization forces you to compare each task to all of the others to determine how important it really is.
- This makes it easier to identify flaws in the everything-is-crucial approach.
Agile Prioritization for Work and Personal Projects
Create a marketing strategy
- Plan a training session
- Buy a house
- Meet your annual goals at work
- Organize a vacation itinerary
- Use relative prioritization to make sure you get to visit the attractions you’re most excited about
Intermediate Agile Prioritization Techniques
A criticality level represents how important a specific task is to the overall project
- There are four levels of criticality that are commonly used in Agile
- Critical
- Critical tasks must be completed
- High
- High priority tasks are things that aren’t absolutely critical but you want more than anything else on the list
- Medium
- Medium priority task are things you still want, but things you want less than the high priorities
- Low
- Lowpriority tasks are nice-to-haves that you could definitely live without
Helpful Tools for Agile Prioritization
Google Sheets, Excel Online, or Airtable
- Each of these tools lets you build spreadsheets for free that function similarly to a handwritten to do list, with the added bonus of letting you cut, paste, and add rows easily.
- Use a Kanban app like Trello
- Drag and drop tasks to prioritize them
- Color-code tasks to signify criticality levels
- Add due dates
- Share the list with multiple users
- Send automatic notifications when a task is assigned to a new user
Advanced Agile Prioritization Techniques
Break every to do item down into the smallest possible tasks
- Example: A large task for an eCommerce site is “accept payments.”
- Broken down into smaller tasks, you have “accept credit card payments,” “accept ACH payments”, “accept PayPal payments,” and so on.
- For a wedding, “get clothes for everyone in the wedding party.”
Final Prioritized List
It will only take 9.5 days to complete all critical and high tasks.
- To get the biggest benefit from agile prioritization, break every task and to do into the smallest possible tasks to help with prioritization and get things done faster.
