Here is a fun prioritization exercise. Some have described it as a Jedi mind trick. It is very simple but it plays with people’s head in a good way. It draws heavily from Joshua Arnold's work on cost of delay, particularly this article on qualitative cost of delay
Interesting concept. Out of curiosity, how many years have you used this in production? I ask b/c it seems the equation weights longer duration items less, which may cause you to delay starting them in favor of shorter duration ones, when sometimes you may have needed to start the longer duration ones sooner because they take longer to complete (say, to meet a soft or hard deadline 1-3yrs in the future). If you’ve used this in production for at least 3yrs, I’m curious if you’ve ever done a postmortem and realized you should have started a longer-duration task sooner, but were steered away from it by this calculation. And if so is there a way of accounting or adjusting for that?
Deadlines and long efforts that require starting sooner rather than later can take on interesting urgency profiles. In effect, we should start efforts at the last responsible moment. If start later, that could take cause poor economic outcomes. That's how 1-3y could have high CD3 and "win out". Not sure if that make sense....
Oh I see, yes that makes sense. Work backwards from the deadline, estimate the latest possible responsible start date, and the closer you get to that more the task moves up the urgency scale. Then I suppose it’s still possible there are tasks that are urgent+valuable+short duration which could still trump the urgent+valuable+long duration one, until you reach that latest responsible start date. Then the latter must start regardless of how many of the former there are.
Interesting concept. Out of curiosity, how many years have you used this in production? I ask b/c it seems the equation weights longer duration items less, which may cause you to delay starting them in favor of shorter duration ones, when sometimes you may have needed to start the longer duration ones sooner because they take longer to complete (say, to meet a soft or hard deadline 1-3yrs in the future). If you’ve used this in production for at least 3yrs, I’m curious if you’ve ever done a postmortem and realized you should have started a longer-duration task sooner, but were steered away from it by this calculation. And if so is there a way of accounting or adjusting for that?
Deadlines and long efforts that require starting sooner rather than later can take on interesting urgency profiles. In effect, we should start efforts at the last responsible moment. If start later, that could take cause poor economic outcomes. That's how 1-3y could have high CD3 and "win out". Not sure if that make sense....
Oh I see, yes that makes sense. Work backwards from the deadline, estimate the latest possible responsible start date, and the closer you get to that more the task moves up the urgency scale. Then I suppose it’s still possible there are tasks that are urgent+valuable+short duration which could still trump the urgent+valuable+long duration one, until you reach that latest responsible start date. Then the latter must start regardless of how many of the former there are.
I do something similar with AMMERSE. There are seven values, to aid the discussion as well decision making and prioritisation.
This is really good!
I think the last sentence implicitly refers to people burning the magician once the trick has been executed. :)