A week back I was discussing the use of scatter charts with a colleague of mine during backlog prioritization. I am now attempting to automate this process in Microsoft Excel.
The problem with backlog prioritization is that often only the business priority is considered. By combining the complexity and risk of the task we can see that objectives that are both easy to do and has a large impact on the business should be prioritized.
The idea was to combine the clients business priority with our measure of perceived risk and priority. This gave us a scatter matrix graph. Note that both values was entered in percentage values where 100 is the high number.
By adding an overlay according to the Boston Chart type, we can see that
- Requirements with high business value and low risk/complexity give the highest backlog priority
- Requirements with low business value and high risk/complexity give the lowest backlog priority
The source data also contains a small calculation to give the weighted combined priority which can be overridden with the “adjusted priority” field.
You can download the Excel file from my CodePlex site.
To get the hover labels, you also need Rob Bovey’s Chart Labeler.
1 comments:
I think it's looking good. It's a model with simple parameters and the visualization makes it easier to communicate and discuss these matters with customers. However I have two reflections regarding the model:
a) What about "showstoppers", i.e. functionality that simply must be implemented before the product is finished? Some functionality may not have the highest of business value but may still be required for some reason (e.g. required by law). My suggestion is to add "necessity" as a word on the same axis as "business value".
b) About the concept of risk/complexity: I think that there lies a value in eliminating risks as early as possible in a project. But I'm referring to risk as in "can we solve the problem" rather than "complex solution". One way to do this is to do a proof of concept before even doing the product backlog. What are your reflections on this? If a POC isn't a prerequisite for requirements with high "technical risk" entering this model, a suggestion is to remove risk from the x-axis and put it in the formula for calculating the priority (adding to the priority).
A totally different "brain storming style"-idea (i.e. not completely thought thru) on how to visualize this model:
a) put "technical risk"/"necessity" on the y-axis
b) remove business value from the y-axis
c) give the pin-points volume in relation to its business value. Big bubbles = big business value.
Big bubbles up in the left corner should be top priority.
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