Prioritizing Work Best Practices

Question

Hello -

We are having trouble prioritizing work in a single software project.

We have project work that is broken down into epics, each epic given a WSJF score.

Then we have managed work (addresses issues, bugs, enhancements) that has been bucketed into a single epic, with no priority score.

We have no way to identify what managed work should be prioritized and pulled into a sprint, since it doesn't have a score.

I am considering changing these requests to all be epics (even though it seems overkill) to be able to score and rank them properly.

Thoughts?

Anne Saunders · Answer

Have you considered using the native Priority field to organize sub-epic work items? It wouldn't interfere with your project work scoring, but it would give you insights into good ranking for the individual managed work items.

If you give each Bug, etc. a Priority value of its own, you could also leverage it in a 'Managed Work' board for each affected project, and use Queries to create Priority-based Swimlanes.

One word of warning, though - I'd also create a custom Priority scheme with a value for 'Unprioritized' and set that as the default - if everything is 'Medium' (the default scheme's default value) it's difficult to tell what's actually medium priority, and what hasn't been addressed yet.

Joshua Brock _ Seibert Group_ GmbH · Answer

Greetings Lindsay ... hope all is well!

I'm certain you'll get a good mix of responses here, just wanted to pass along one from my perspective as the content/technical writer for Agile Hive.

Whether practicing SAFe® or not, you can make use of the dashboards at each level of your organization to see and manage capacities, dependencies, monitor metrics like WSJF, burn-up charts, etc. Specifically in the Breakout Board, includes capacity calculation for use in PI Planning.

We have two articles addressing PI and capacity planning, respectively:

Embrace Jira Capacity Planning
5 Best Practices for PI Planning

Any questions after you've had a chance to give these a look, please feel free to reach out.

Best of luck in your search!
 
Thanks!  Joshua