4 Powerful Prioritization Frameworks to Boost Your Productivity

Effective time management plus prioritization skills will help you keep a good job and succeed as a professional.

Applying the most effective ways to prioritize tasks and issues may increase your value as an employee and help to increase your promotion. How to prioritize tasks like a pro and choose the best options among the variety of techniques and methods? This post covers 4 great frameworks to do it.

All we know that not all work tasks are of equal importance. It’s rather critical to focus on the consequences of not completing the task when deciding which tasks require immediate attention.

There are dozens of convenient frameworks. You may find them exploring popular project management platforms such as Hygger, ProductPlan, ProductBoard, and others.

Here we define top-4 prioritization frameworks, arranging them in our list in order from the simplest to the most complex ones for the real guru of prioritization. This “scale”, for example, is offered by the project management platform, Hygger.io.

4 Powerful Prioritization Frameworks

Prioritization with 2×2 matrix

What is the idea? This framework which is based on the famous Eisenhower matrix model helps to compare required combinations (for example, Value vs Effort combination or Value vs Cost) that help to prioritize tasks better and choose the most important ones for development. For example:
– Value shows which business value a certain feature can bring to a product or business
– Effort measures the resources needed to complete the task

It is visualized with the matrix or a special chart. Hygger Backlog Priority Chart allows to use 4 segments with specific priority blocks: Time Sinks (tasks are not worth working on at the moment), Maybes (tasks that do not bring a lot of value but are easy to implement), Big Bets (tasks that can bring a lot of value but are as well hard to implement), Quick Wins (tasks are valuable and quite easy to implement).

Prioritization with ICE Scoring

What is the idea? ICE scoring system is the method for prioritization that includes the formula for calculating the final score of the feature value in the following way:

In this formula:
– your assurance in your evaluation is represented by Confidence
– the featured effect on the product is Impact
– the Ease is about the easiness of implementation

You have to rate your entire feature requests and choose the most valuable ones to implement. That’s it!

Prioritization with RICE Scoring

What is the idea? RICE Scoring model includes 4 values to evaluate a feature or idea:
– Reach rates how many people each feature will effect within a certain period of time and how many of them will notice the changes
– Impact demonstrates how the feature will contribute to the product and how will the project impact your customers
– Confidence shows how I’m sure about all my estimation – both about impact and effort (how much my estimations look like a truth)
– Effort is estimated as a number of “person-months”, weeks or hours, depending on needs. It is the work that one team member can do in a specific month.
All you need to do here is to rank proposed features with these 4 parameters and use the final score you’ve come up with to decide what should be implemented at first.

Prioritization with Weighted Scoring

What is the idea? With the Weighted Scoring system, you can evaluate product features by your own criteria. Each criterion can have its own weight and scale (from 0…to 10).

Using this prioritization approach, you can take your features or initiatives, rank them with the help of a benefit-versus-cost framework on a number of criteria, and then use the scores you’ve come up with to decide which initiatives make the cut. The Weighted Scoring method can be useful for companies to evaluate what they think is the relative impact on strategic objectives for a group of possible new features.

After you’ve evaluated all your features using ICE, RICE or Weighted scoring, it’s the time to select the winners from them using a special rank table.

Conclusion

It’s up to you what prioritization framework to choose. Use the simple prioritization matrix to decide each feature’s final priority or apply more interesting scoring models. No need to discover continents! Just choose an appropriate project management tool with an available prioritization framework and get your advanced results!