Introducing the latest Foxly 🦊 feature: Priority Planning Poker! 🃏

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Prioritization isn’t as easy as you think.

When most tasks are considered “high priority”, how do you choose? And when you do, how do you ensure the decision is unanimous, or that a HiPPO won’t come along (yes, HiPPO i.e. the ‘highest paid person’s opinion’) to turn things upside down, because we all know that can happen! And when it does happen, how do you expect your team to feel like they matter in the bigger scheme of things?

What is inclusion in the workspace?

An inclusive space is a space where individuals are able to endorse their knowledge and talents in the most efficient way and to the greatest benefit for the organization; right? Inclusion is not a way to fit people into existing structures (which aren’t designed to include them in the first place), but rather create new structures that take them into consideration. 

The idea behind inclusive leadership is to help teams feel like they belong; it’s giving them confidence, security and motivation. 

How does this translate into prioritization?

As you may already know, Foxly is all about inclusive prioritization; and it just got better at it! 

So let us introduce you to our latest feature: Priority Planning Poker, which allows you to include everyone in the prioritization process and ensure grooming meetings don’t drag until the end of time.

What is Priority Planning Poker?

Priority Planning Poker is a technique that allows everyone on the team to equally contribute to the prioritization process; it basically removes bias. The fundamentals are simple:

• Create a poker room with selected issues and invite team members
• Allow them to vote on metrics in real-time
• Present the results of the voting, together with each member’s votes
• Discuss when necessary and retake voting if outliers are prominent
  
  

How can you benefit from Priority Planning Poker?

Priority Planning Poker is used as a solution to a few prioritization issues that tend to come up along the way:

• Lengthy prioritization sessions: when prioritization sessions can’t seem to end!
• Overpromoted ideas: when one person falls way too in love with their idea.
• HIPPO (highest paid person opinion): when they think they’re it.
• Loudest person in the room: when they win simply because they’re louder. 
• Introverts: because many creative people may be introverts who aren’t exactly out there.
• Refrain from expressing ideas: when people go along with other opinions instead of expressing their own.
• Disagreement: when people have different opinions and cannot seem to agree. 
• Too many involved: when it’s hard to give everyone a say in prioritization because they’re too many. 

To summarize

What Priority Planning Poker offers is to:

• speed up prioritization sessions
• give everyone the option to contribute to the final priorities 
• highlight outside opinions to guide the discussion in the right direction
• bring fun and gamify the prioritization meetings

When can you use Priority Planning Poker?

• Any type of planning meeting where more than one person decides on priorities. 
• Annual business planning meetings where initiatives and ideas are prioritized by executives. 
• Backlog grooming sessions where Product owner/Product manager and team members discuss stories.
• Sprint planning meetings where backlog items such as stories, bugs and improvements are prioritized by the Scrum Master, Product Owner and all team members.
• Requirements management planning meetings which include Requirement managers, Sales, executives, developers, marketing team, and so on.

How does Priority Planning Poker work?

The way it works is quite simple actually. 

1. During the prioritization session, the moderator (session admin) is responsible for leading the game.

2. For every item that gets introduced, the team anonymously votes on metric values. Votes are then revealed and an average is calculated.

3. This is inclusive prioritization, which means that the team could accept the final result, or when there are outliers, a discussion happens to clarify why certain people voted the way they did, and voting can be retaken. This process will happen for all additional metrics that contribute to the score.

4. Prioritization meetings are 1-2 hours long maximum, otherwise attention drops and people get fed up so they start voting haphazardly. We don’t want that!

Strategic decision making should simply be a group activity; there’s a reason why voting matters in this world, and no organization is immune to that. Also, playing makes everyone happy (yes, everyone!) regardless of what they’re doing, so why not turn your prioritization session into a game?

Find out more about Foxly features, and try the app for free here!

[Tushita Sarkar Biswas]

This is amazing! Most companies struggle with what needs to be done first and in which order.

Introducing 'prioritization' in project management is definitely the wayt to go.