Finding the right balance for the Impact Score

[Andres Sanchez]

I'm trying to find the right formula for the Impact Score. 

I'm considering Business Value, Customer value and Strategic fit as positive factors. I want to include Effort as a negative, but I'm finding it has too much impact on the result.

It's not easy to determine the impact on the formula of the negative factor, but I understand that there are 4 criteria, 3 positive and one negative. The negative one is affecting 1/4th of the weight.

I'd like to soften the negative impact of the Effort, and doing some research, I found some options like the square root of the effort multiplied by 7, but they are not allowed as it just allows me to add a negative factor with 100% value. 

I've tested adding another negative factor such as Technical complexity to soften the negative impact of the Effort, but the results penalise the positive factors even more.

What can I do to lower the impact of the Effort as a  negative factor?

Thanks for the help

[James Conway]

i had a similar challenge, and got around it by squaring my important term. 

For prioritising assumptions, I have 

({Importance}*{Importance})/({Evidence}*{Effort})

So perhaps you could multiple Business Value, Customer Value and Strategic Fit and then Divide by Effort? 

Or you follow Sean Ellis guidance on ICE (Impact Confidence Ease) prioritisation where he models effort from 10 easy to 1 hard (rather than effort high hard, low easy)

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Andres Sanchez -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I do not believe the square root function is supported for such formulas: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-product-discovery/docs/expression-based-formulas/

If you want to use such functions, you could instead calculate the value using an automation rule, triggered on a change to one of the source fields: https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-cloud-automation/

I do not know how your team is using (or originally defining) "impact score".  Have you instead considered using some form of calculation which does not use square roots?  For example:

Sum of Value (as money) / Effort Required (as money)

Where both are time-based functions due to aging and scheduling of work items.  For example, this may better account for requests with similar value and different effort.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Andres Sanchez]

Thanks for your prompt reply and suggestions Bill. 

Your formula is a good one, but for our business, it is very difficult to define the Value (as money), so it does not match our needs. 

What I want to do is to decrease the weight of the effort. We want to take into account with different weights: what brings revenue, value and what is strategic, but  want to downgrade the result with a negative weight of the effort. 
With the weight average proposed by Atlassian, the impact of the effort is too big on the result, so I'm trying to find a formula that takes it into account but does not penalise that much the positive factors. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Thank you for that information.  Without that function in the custom formulas, I believe an automation rule is the only workaround.

[Andres Sanchez]

I'm trying to create my own formula.

I've introduced:

({Business Value} * 0.5) + ({Customer Value} * 0.3) + ({Strategic Fit} * 0.2) - (sqrt({Effort}) * 0.7)

but it says, "it can not parse the expression."

The terms are properly written. Any idea of what could be happening? 

[Hermance NDounga]

Hello Andres, 

sqrt isn't a function supported by Jira Product Discovery as per Formula documentation 

I'm not sure how you mesure the effort today (which field type you're using). But technically you can simply create options and weight them.  . 
The square root won't be perfect because it doesn't support commas, but you'll have a functionning formula. 

Best Regards,
Hermance
Product Manager @ Jira Product Discovery