It is Monday morning, the first day of the work week. You start planning your weekly activities out in your notebook. You identify 10 crucial activities that need to be conducted this week. You now need to prioritize what activities need to be done now, and what can be done later. There are many ways to prioritize. You can either prioritize based on the available resources, or based on the difficulty of the task.
Most of us will prioritize based on difficulty of tasks. However, do these tasks provide any value to your organization or your client?
If the answer is no, a new method of prioritization may be required. One option that could be considered is value-based prioritisation. It is an agile project management methodology concept which prioritizes tasks on what adds the most business value to your customer and your company.
You start with tasks which provide the greatest value. If I provide my client or organization what they value, I will certainly be adding value to my client and organization. This will prevent a fixation on getting the easiest task done first. This new method of prioritization will focus on work where your customer and organization spends the lowest resources and time, whilst receiving the highest value.
So how do you prioritize what adds value to your organization? Simple. This can be done by identifying what the client needs and not what they want. Needs are necessities that your customer cannot live without. To get those needs you will need to ask the right questions to the right person at the right time. Value based prioritization works when a task or activity is divided into separate distinct deliverables/features. Each deliverable or feature will need to be ordered and separated based on the client’s needs.
For example, when building a website, the overall layout, payment options and the clients’ testimonials have been identified ask major features by the customer. The three features will then be ordered and separated based on how those features will add value to your customer. Once that is over, the customer highlights that the overall layout will add the most value to them followed by client testimonials and payment options. Therefore, work must be started on the overall layout of the website. The additional features can be done once the overall layout is complete.
In conclusion, all tasks and activities for operations or future projects need to prioritize to add value to the customer and the organization. Just like when you are building a website, identify the feature, tasks or activity that adds most value and start work on it immediately. Once the first activity is complete, you can work on the rest.
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Click here to see previous article on how to manage time effectively using time boxing.
From,
Udhay Sharma
Scrum Master Certified and Scrum enthusiast since 2017
