Thought on Priority

Getting back on my latest theme, I want to talk about prioritising. I am currently working on enhancing our team's task management (and project management). The crux of task management is getting the most important or highest priority tasks done first. The problem comes in when all tasks are high priority.

But where does the high priority come from? Most would solve this by asking their customer, "is this high or low priority?" And we all know the answer, don't we.

Instead of asking our customer for the result of a complicated function, why don't we help them out and just ask for something they do know that will help us determine the answer. This is important because priority of one task is relative to all other oustanding tasks at the time you are evaluating it not at the time of requesting work be done.

This is important because we really only need to know relative priority at a moment when there is contention for a resource. If we have no contention, then tasks get worked on immediately, don't they?

This is me.

How High?

If you run a software development team, you are probably faced with the fact that the backlog of work is greater than your team will ever get through. So, you have to prioritise. In most cases, people will want to use Low, Medium or High. Better yet, they might use a scale of 1 to 10.

What does that mean? And how does it help you?

Low, Medium and High are one of my pet pieves. They are relative terms - which is fine. But too often, we are asked to assign a value when we don't know what this is relative to.

I think capturing other relevant information such as what if this doesn't get done on time? would be far mor useful. That way when someone is trying to evaluate priorities, they can re-assess the relative priority of all tasks based on the impact of failure. Or perhaps value derived from success (which is basically the inverse).

I really want some feedback on this as I think this is much more profound and fundamental that most would expect.