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Agile Project Management - How to Strategically Prioritize User Stories

March 10, 2013 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management

Agile Project Management - How to Strategically Prioritize User Stories
By Terry Bunio

One of the reasons I love to read books on Agile is because of the wealth of great ideas out there. It seems like every book I read allows me to discover one or two news ideas. The book I am currently reading is Ken Collier’s “Agile Analytics”. While reading this book I was introduced to the idea of prioritizing project requirements using the Purpose Alignment Model. (The model was proposed by Pixton et al in the 2009 book “Stand Back and Deliver”) Although the principle of getting the clients to prioritize your project requirements doesn’t change, the method does provide a structure and context that can inject new insights into the prioritization process.

Purpose Alignment Model

The Purpose Alignment Model proposes that you separate your project requirements into 4 categories based upon their strategic importance to the business. The categories proposed are:

  1. Business Differentiating Activities – These are project requirements that support activities that are both marketing-differentiating and mission-critical. These are strategic activities that will add to the growth of the company. These activities are usually aligned with new opportunities. The company risks the loss of growth if these activities are not done.

  2. Business Parity Activities – These are project requirements that support activities that are mission-critical but not market differentiating. These are operational activities that will allow the company to maintain their current position in the market. The company risks losing their position in the market if these activities are not done.

  3. Partnering Activities – These are project requirements that support activities that are not mission-critical but are market-differentiating. These are typically partnering opportunities in the market to create new opportunity and growth. Unlike the Business Differentiating activities, this activity is looking to find a partner to share the cost of this market-differentiating opportunity.

  4. Who Cares Activities – These are the project requirements that support activities that are neither market-differentiating or mission critical.

Conclusion

I’m planning to use this structure on the next opportunity to prioritize User Stories in the backlog. I believe it will allow for interesting insights into where the development team is spending their efforts in each iteration. I also think the clients would find the information interesting. Especially if we are spending more than 50% of our time consistently on developing functionality to support “Who Cares Activities”.

Terry Bunio is currently a Principal Consultant at Protegra. He has managed multiple complex projects and provided Project Management, Architecture and Database leadership for companies such as Manitoba Public Insurance, LPL Financial, Assante Asset Management, Moventum, Government of Manitoba, Investors Group, and London Life. More recently Terry’s focus and passion has been on managing Lean projects and being part of Lean and Agile Project teams. As a practical Project Manager, Terry is known to challenge assumptions and strive to strike the balance between the theoretical book agile and the real world approaches.

www.agilist.ca

Protegra helps organizations in the private and public sectors identify and solve tough business performance challenges. Protegra offers management consulting services focused on operational efficiencies. For organizations that use information technology as a competitive advantage, Protegra offers software services development and solutions.

www.protegra.com

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 10th, 2013 and is filed under Agile Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

Sounds a bit like a modification of the four quadrants of Eisenhower method of time management applied to prioritizing user stories.

Francesco wrote on March 11, 2013 - 12:31 pm | Visit Link

Taking first look at the purpose alignment model, I find the 4 point approach to requirements prioritization similar to the MoSCoW model (Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Won’t Have).. I need to further explore Purpose Alignment model though!

Sachin Deshmukh wrote on March 28, 2013 - 8:14 am | Visit Link

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