PRIORITY and VALUE through what is a stake: RISK - and meaningful conversations
In my previous post, I've talked about what is priority and value anyway, and that ultimately a way to frame and make better decisions around that is to capture nuances in a multidimensional fashion, and to talk about risks at stake. If you have watched the webinar, which I have linked there, you will likely have some deeper level of understanding on how that all can come together.
But as part of my current undertaking at work, where I am attempting to structure the adoption of these practices in our context, I believe I came up with some interesting patterns to share. While the whole point of risk profiling and assessment, in the context of prioritization (or options filtering) which are fitter-to-purpose, are all about figuring out what dimensions matter where you are and for the type of work at hand, I believe it's safe to say that there are some commonly recurring ones.
So, I went on to list those down and to frame relevant questions that can help to assess them (or in fact even to challenge):
When I recently walked a group of lead PMs (product managers) through the overarching idea of setting up a risk profile assessment approach, as a way to frame prioritization through options filtering, there were two interesting callouts worth mentioning here:
A question about the difference between urgency and impact of delay - and I totally get where the mixing comes from… To which I responded as being the difference between the potential risk (urgency) and what is the actual issue when we are late (impact of delay).
How this more nuanced multidimensional approach compares to other prioritization methods which aim at getting a final (weighted) score - granting it to be likely an evolution. Not because it makes lives easier, on the contrary arguably it does not, but because it provides more perspective.
That is the whole thing about prioritization challenges. There is a big chance of what sounds simple on paper becoming simplistic, and thus losing credibility and easily going back to the old ways (e.g., "who shout the loudest get it first", "high pay person opinion (HIPPO)" ways of prioritizing). Sometimes, all it takes is more perspective, evaluate more of the nuances of the underlying risks in meaningful dimensions, and with that, nurture more meaningful conversations.
And it is the latter who aids the higher maturity and robustness of the process, not the framework as such.
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact