When Everything is Important But Nothing is Getting Done

-Higher velocity: projects began to be delivered faster.-Higher quality of work: having the support needed meant less shortcuts taken, more testing, and better delivery.-Lower coordination overhead:coordination and support problems were preempted by a single stack rank. It was clear to everyone how work weighed against each other.-Higher satisfacti... See more

When projects are scoped too large, a few things happen: They take a long time to deliver, which means that work is locked up for long periods of time without creating value.

When you commit to quantifying urgency and impact, you create a shared language as to why you’re working on something:Urgency is a byproduct of deadlines and dependencies. Do you need something tomorrow, or can you get it in two weeks? Is a project a dependency for something else to move forward?Impact is a combination of potential value created ve... See more

Our projects were scoped too large. The larger they got, the longer they took and the more risk and scope creep was introduced.

Objectives are great! “Objectives versus priorities” is similar to “problem versus solution” thinking. Objectives tell you the goal and let you figure out how to get there. You set your own priorities and the only thing that matters is if the goal is achieved or not.

The definition of done we implemented had three key questions for us to answer:-Did it solve the user problem?-Was it deployed to production? -Has it been in use for a ‘long-enough’ period of time?

As Fred Brooks pointed out almost 50 years ago, “adding more engineers to an already late project won’t make it go faster”.

Your goal with any project should be to solve user problems, not just to ship features.

"High-medium-low" doesn’t scale. At four or more tasks, you’re forced to start doubling down on designations or to create subcategories of priorities. Eventually, you find yourself with a bucket of “high priority” projects wherein you don’t know what to tackle first.

-Do one project at a time, in order