What is PRIORITY and VALUE anyway?
This is something that was sparked by my recent training from the David J Anderson School of Management for my Kanban Product Professional certification. It is largely common sense, if you really think about it, but I have lived long enough to know that to be not as "common" as we might assume by the expression.
Have you ever thought about what priority actually means? I think if we go to its etymological sense, it was rather objective - what takes precedence (and by the way, originally didn't accept plural, so it was really supposed to be the "number 1").
But what about in business? Do we always mean that?
Or can that have different facets depending on who's talking and in which context?
Sometimes it's about when something should be done.
Other times it's rather on when something should be started.
Then, occasionally, is closer to the original meaning, and it's about the number 1 thing we want to select from a list of options to do next.
At times, it can also be a proxy of how something should be treated along the way - like the so-called priority mail when you send some document that goes via air.
If that's the case, then I am totally with David Anderson on that we should strive to use more precise language (see video below) and refer to:
Sequencing.
Scheduling.
Selection.
Class of Service.
Now, what about value? Is it always about the "dollars at sake"? Or is it rather also a matter of context and how we balance potentially conflicting risks?
It's multidimensional. And so should it be how we make decisions that aim at assessing it. Preferably, we do it in a pragmatic fashion. As I thought about it, I pictured in my mind VALUE as composition, so gave it a try to see if I could transform it in an acronym - this is the first iteration of it:
Verifiable
Assessment of
Locally
Unified
Evaluations
Which is to say:
Verifiable → non-speculative, highly factual,
Assessment of → way to make a judgment,
Locally → bounded by context,
Unified → standardized and consistent
Evaluations → appraisal of the value (or in fact risks).
With that, we have a way to capture the nuances of what dimensions to consider in terms of the risks of the value at stake. And you can, in fact you should, define the dimensions that make sense in your context, as they should represent the most relevant risks at your own place.
Got intrigued? This webinar from David Anderson himself presents a nice introduction of how that can look like and how you make it actionable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP0-oZBgE94&t=269s
I believe this to be one of the key enablers for an organization to become truly agile, as it unleashes the power of truly federated decision-making for prioritization which is not subject to nearly pure subjectivity nor simplistic on the number of dimensions that are considered. It simplifies the complex, ultimately.
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
P.S.: if you have been following this more or less from the start, you might have noticed I stopped doing the weekly insight pills posts. I am afraid I overreached in my ambition and couldn't keep up with two posts a week. As a compromise, what I have been trying to do recently is to add an element of that to my regular posts, by referencing and including related material.