Recognize Ranking Traps

Ranking the work by value challenges many people. Watch for these traps:

• Using estimation—and only estimation—to rank the work.

• Someone else pressuring the product owner to change the ranking to accommodate another person’s desires.

• Ranking all the work for months or a release at the beginning of a project.

You have options for managing these traps.

Trap: Rank Only by Estimation

Some teams try to use estimation to rank their work. If we had perfect knowledge, we might be able to use estimation. However, we rarely have perfect knowledge about the work or the estimate.

If you know you have a one-day or shorter story, you can ​Rank the Shortest Work First​. However, teams often have less knowledge than they need about the story size. Or the story is much larger than one day. In that case, using estimation to rank often doesn’t work.

Trap: Someone Else Pressures the Product Owner

You may have heard of the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person in the Office). I would love to say that agile approaches make HiPPOs go away. Not so. However, agile approaches make it clear that the HiPPO exists.

If you have a HiPPO who declares, “Everything must be done!” or “Do this first!” or the like, use your influence and collaboration skills to help that person realize the team will progress faster if it limits its WIP and works on one thing at a time, in a way that makes sense for the product.

Sometimes it helps to ask that person about his or her goals or measurements. Sometimes people act in a way that satisfies the people measuring them.

Trap: We Must Rank All of It

Even if you consider rolling-wave planning, as discussed in ​Create Rolling-Wave Roadmaps​, someone might want to rank “all of it.” That’s a trap because as the team finishes small stories, the product owner wants the ability to change which stories the team should do when.

Here are some ways of managing this “all of it” thinking:

• Consider ranking up to three iterations worth of work, or enough to fill a cycle time of about six weeks.

• Consider creating a parking lot, as discussed in ​Use a Feature Parking Lot to See Possibilities​, as a way to manage the not-yet items.

• See if clarifying the product vision and the release criteria helps the product owner and the team manage the requests for “all of it” now, as opposed to later.

It’s tempting for people to want to do “all” of anything. See how you can help people move to “how little” thinking as opposed to the “how much” they traditionally had.