Prioritizing Your Work
Prioritizing your work is absolutely critical. You can do all kinds of things, but if you don’t with some regularity do the right things you won’t be moving forward. A couple of weeks ago in a round-table discussion, someone mentioned prioritizing work based on the principle of maximum benefit for minimum effort. That reminded me that I needed to write up some thoughts and a job aid that I created a few years ago related to that very valuable principle. The theory underlying it is really intuitive and straightforward: ensure you maximize the benefit you get from any unit of work. There’s just two problems with that: 1) how do you determine how much work something is, and 2) how do you determine how much benefit you get from the work? Work estimation is not exactly our strongest point in IT. There was a joke when I started out in software engineering back in,... well, it doesn’t matter when. To estimate how long a software project would take you ask the developer. Then you ...