One of the worst thing is when you're facing a customer with no idea which feature must be implemented before the others.
The question is, how can I help a customer in figuring out the 20% of feature is doing the 80% of business each iteration and sprint over spring she realizes the most important feature for the next iteration. At beginning, I've started asking to complete on a basis of 10 points. Each feature where 0 is the LOW priority and 10 is the MAX Priority. After raw estimation on how complex is the feature, I figured out an ordered Product Backlog with lots of MAX priority feature and the priorly implemented are the minor complex one and then move again. With this approach, I discovered there's no rationales on the Product Owner side to decide what is really need priorly. Well, after lots of thinking I've tried to formalize a mechanism that push the Product Owner to think about the Benefits on having the feature and the Penalties on not having it. With this approach, I've pushed the Product Owner mindset from a selectable option to a selection on consideration. When thinking, I found an Algorithm similar to the "Wiegers Relative Weighting Approach" where I computed which is the less complex feature with major benefits and minor penalties. Three variables influence the priority:
The question is, how can I help a customer in figuring out the 20% of feature is doing the 80% of business each iteration and sprint over spring she realizes the most important feature for the next iteration. At beginning, I've started asking to complete on a basis of 10 points. Each feature where 0 is the LOW priority and 10 is the MAX Priority. After raw estimation on how complex is the feature, I figured out an ordered Product Backlog with lots of MAX priority feature and the priorly implemented are the minor complex one and then move again. With this approach, I discovered there's no rationales on the Product Owner side to decide what is really need priorly. Well, after lots of thinking I've tried to formalize a mechanism that push the Product Owner to think about the Benefits on having the feature and the Penalties on not having it. With this approach, I've pushed the Product Owner mindset from a selectable option to a selection on consideration. When thinking, I found an Algorithm similar to the "Wiegers Relative Weighting Approach" where I computed which is the less complex feature with major benefits and minor penalties. Three variables influence the priority: - the Benefits of having the feature;
- the Penalty of not having the feature;
- the Estimation (I prefer Complexity - but is another thing) of the feature
The priority is computed on:
The bigger priority is the most important feature in terms of easiness, penalty, and benefit. In this way, I discovered that Product Owners put in an ordered way their Feature List.
Endnotes
It is useful to work with this approach on attributing priorities. Product Owner works on the Product Backlog and integrate the new feature with this approach and reorder them. This is how a team should commit on a bunch of feature that is really valuable for the Customer.
priority = [(relative benefit + relative penalty) / (sum of relative benefit + sum of relative penalty)] / ( relative estimation / sum of relative estimation)
The bigger priority is the most important feature in terms of easiness, penalty, and benefit. In this way, I discovered that Product Owners put in an ordered way their Feature List.
Endnotes
It is useful to work with this approach on attributing priorities. Product Owner works on the Product Backlog and integrate the new feature with this approach and reorder them. This is how a team should commit on a bunch of feature that is really valuable for the Customer.
