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.