Agile & Setting Priorities

Tom Breur

21 May 2017

When everything’s a priority, then nothing is. Abundant research has shown that multi-tasking kills productivity. When you try to spread your attention across too many projects, this causes excessive context switching. The more you try to do, the less you actually get done. That is why you need to have clear priorities to establish what to focus on, and in what order.

Agile is particularly effective when it comes to aligning the team as a whole, to make sure everybody focuses on the highest value work, first. Short-cyclical feedback loops like daily stand-up meetings, ensure that alignment continues by swarming to remove bottlenecks and impediments.

When Agile teams start off, they go on a journey of transformation. Planning cycles that are book ended by a product demo and subsequent retrospective drive continuous improvement. This can be a slow, yet disruptive process. Often, when Agile teams run into an impediment, this is at the fringe of the agile team that is rubbing shoulders with adjacent business processes.

No team can control the entire value chain, there will always be some friction at the fringes. When this occurs at the edge between an Agile team and parts of the organization that haven’t embarked on that same transformation, yet, lack of clear priorities for the less Agile teams is often the root cause for friction. Even if your counterpart isn’t quite ready to embrace Agile, you can still help them set priorities. Maybe not as crisp and clear as an Agile backlog, but some shuffling in tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 priorities can start a process of change and improvement for them, too.

MoSCoW is an acronym that has been used within the Agile tradition, but can be applied in other contexts, too. If you relate it to your 3 tiers it can spur a discussion about feasibility and hopefully kickstart discussion around relative value, urgency, etc. Take small steps, one at a time, and you will move forward…