Which project should we prioritize next?

Full transcript

Intro

In this series I answer tough questions that I hear come up over and over again around design thinking and innovation, frameworks like design sprints and problem framing, facilitation, remote collaboration, and all sorts of really important questions.

In today's session, this is Episode #5, we're gonna get a little bit strategic and talk about planning and answer the questions, "Which project should we prioritize next?"

Today’s question

Alright, so we're answering the questions, "Which project should we prioritize next?"

Now this question is important. It's important to you and the team because you're about to spend the next week or month or quarter, maybe even a year or more working on this project. And it's important to the company because they're paying you to spend all that time and those resources on this project.

So both groups want to get it right. The problem is that the decision-making process traditionally isn't designed. It's just more or less an arbitrary discussion or decision-making process and what it tends to look like, is you'll have a few folks sitting at the top that will cherry pick the top problems that they're seeing in the company, maybe a specific focus that they have, a market that they're interested in exploring and innovating, and so you rely on a few folks to make a decision for what the rest of the team and company is going to spend their time and money on.

And with that, comes a bunch of bias because that person, or that select group of people that are deciding what y'all are gonna work on, they have their own bias and assumptions on what's important. And so that means that the rest of the group doesn't get a say in terms of what is important and what we should be spending our time on.

The other thing that I see happen is that groups will throw metrics at a specific problem. They'll bring in a whole bunch of spreadsheets and numbers and say, "According to these statistics, this is what we should be focusing on."

And they haven't spent any time doing some qualitative analysis that that is the right area to focus on. So what I've done is to design this conversation, design this part of the process. I believe that allowing it up for chance and just group dynamics and brainstorming always leads to some disappointments.

So, designing how we prioritize our projects is a really important step. And what I noticed is that I have this larger process called problem framing and in that process, there's a few steps that kick off framing which are all about prioritizing the next problem the thing that we're going to be doing and re-framing in the problem framing workshop, the first three steps are all about prioritization. And there's three steps to it, Problem Discovery, Problem Sensing, and Problem Categorization.

Where the end goal is to get from many different opportunities or problems the group is interested in exploring to the top one that they're inspired by and excited to move forward with.

So just quickly to step you through them, Problem Discovery is using an activity, I call it the Smart Sailboat because I've done a little bit of work to make it a little bit more of a smarter activity, and this is just an opportunity for the group to surface up all these different problems or opportunities, business challenges that they're interested in seeing the group move forward with, see the company invest time and money in.

So this is a way to visualize all the ideas that the group has, that the group is excited to move forward with, and then that way you get this landscape of opportunities. Then, you start to narrow in. So I use a framework called the Cynefin Framework, and this allows you to take all of those challenges that the group had surfaced up in the first step and find the relative complexity because if the initiative for the team is just to get some small, quick wins, then you might want to focus on some simple problems.

But if it's innovation and disruptive thinking, then you might want to be going for complex problems, maybe even some complicated problems. So this lets you have a conversation around the relative complexity of all of the problems that were surfaced up in Step One, and then finally in Step 3, you take that section, the simple or the complex or the complicated problems that you've chosen and now you run them through a 2 by 2 by talking about their relative impact that it would have on the company and the market to solve that problem as well as the difficulty, the effort it would take to solve that problem, and again, this is a relative conversation as well.

And in the end, what you're left with, is a small set of problems that you can then vote on the top one problem that you want to move forward with. This is a great way to design the conversation to kick-start any sort of strategic planning that you're doing especially if you're getting ready to do framing and design sprints and other design thinking sessions. If you want to get access to the tools and the activities, the training and the templates that I use to do prioritization, I've made this Problem Prioritization Toolkit free which you can access and you'll find a link to it in the comments and the post below.

I hope that you enjoyed the toolkit and this process, I hope that it helps for you and the group so that you can find a project and an initiative that you're all really excited to move forward with and that that creates a lot of impact for the company and the market that you're serving.

Thanks, and keep following along with the series where I'll answer some other questions coming up in the next couple weeks. Take care! 

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