I collected their reasons for importance. Some were about keeping promises, some were about providing increased quality (uptime, correct function), and there were other kinds of importance. We wrote them on a 3×5 card. Ultimately, we realized that the company’s reputation is their source of importance. Users needed to know that the company will do the right things, and provide software that worked and kept them working. I thought it was a good criteria.

Next I explained that urgency is different from importance. There may be a hot demand for some cosmetic changes that don’t really impact the company’s reputation one way or another. There may be some changes that in the direction we want to go. These may be hot topics, but may not be truly important.

We could see a difference between the forces of urgency and the force of importance, but there is gray area as a sufficient pent-up demand for otherwise unimportant changes could in fact effect our reputation for service. Still, we could usually see a crisp-enough boundary for any given user story.

I then (re-)introduced the team to Stephen Covey’s four-quadrant system. It has two axes. The vertical is importance (important at the top, unimportant below). The horizontal is urgency with urgent things to the left and non-urgent on the right:

Q1 Important and Urgent	Q2 Important, not Urgent
Q3 Unimportant and Urgent	Q4 Neither important nor urgent

We took our set of cards and the team determined groupings. Was this a quadrant one activity? Quadrant 3? Quadrant 2? There were some real surprises, especially when we realized our “most important” bit of work was not urgent and should wait until quadrant one activities were finished.

Covey’s recommendation is that we tackle first those items that are both important and urgent. When we knock that stack down, we move on to those that are important but not urgent. If we have time left, those non-important-but-urgent items can “fly standby” in our sprint. We reordered the priorities in accordance with Covey’s recommendation.

We had no cards that were both unimportant and non-urgent.

At this point in time, we had what looked very much like a magic funnel. Ideas came in from everywhere, and the items that moved from the planning team to the developers came out in the “magically correct” order. We agreed that the selection and the ordering were the best we could do at the time.

Our next sprint planning meeting was remarkably efficient.

My first strategy was to get the right people in a room and have them fight it out. I think that the prioritization process should be a lot like local government (maybe a school board?) in that people should argue and complain and push and eventually settle on compromises and deals. Ultimately, I believe that people who have a strong interest in the company can make the right decisions. At least they can be right enough for the next 5 days. When you have one-week iterations, the next chance to change the agenda is never far away.

This first strategy didn’t work out, and so we went to a backup plan. A C level manager said he knew what we should do, and so we scheduled an hour or so with him, myself, our priority manager (“funnel guy”) and the senior technical developer.

Our guys used the sticky post-it 3×5 cards and papered the CIO’s windows and whiteboards. They listed the various categories of work from the various stakeholders and pasted them up in priority order.

I asked my first pedantic question: “What is the single most important thing we can work on? If you had only one story that you knew for sure would be finished this week, which would it be?” That led to a nice discussion.

When they placed the card on the table, signifying that it was definitely in the build, I asked again if there was any one card anywhere else in the room more important. I asked if that was really the single most important one.

When the answer was “yes, absolutely” I was ready for my second pedantic question: “Now that this card is off the board, what is the single most important card left for us to do, if only two stories were guaranteed to be done.” Now the pedantry was fully exposed, but the idea had carried. The team collected all the most important stories and placed them in order on the table.

Now I was ready for my next round of pedantry.