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© Expert Decisions Inc.
All rights reserved.
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following Quick Start Guide will help you better understand
the prioritization process in ReleasePlanner® 1.6.
The
term ‘prioritization’ is used for the process
of classifying objects according to their degree of
importance. These objects can be product requirements
or features, projects, services or any other company
specific assets to be prioritized. We will call them
“items to be prioritized” in this tutorial.
A critical
factor in project success is the ability to make well-informed
decisions about when items to be prioritized should
be implemented and released. While ReleasePlanner®
can provide computational intelligence and decision
support in this regard, your intelligent input is vital
to this process. The more qualified and meaningful your
input, the more likely the results will match the overall
real-world planning objectives. The results are based
on the prioritization input as well as on the resources
consumed by the prioritized items. Overall, this results
in a computationally complex problem that is solved
with specialized optimization algorithms.
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| 2.
PLANNING CRITERIA (PRIORITIZATION SCHEMES) |
| Prioritization
can be done from the perspective of different criteria.
ReleasePlanner® offers some often used criteria
but also allows to define specific ones. The specific
criteria are derived from the strategic goals of your
organization. The number of criteria may vary as well.
You may be asked to prioritize according to one or more
of the following criteria:
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Urgency:
the urgency of having a feature or requirement
implemented, a project completed, etc. (1–9
scale, with 1 being least urgent and 9 being
most urgent).
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Value:
the value that a feature, requirement, etc.
adds to a project or a product (1–9 scale,
with 1 having lowest value and 9 having highest
value).
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Risk:
the risk involved with implementing a feature,
requirement, etc. (1–9 scale, with 1 being
the lowest risk, and 9 being the highest risk).
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Dissatisfaction: the degree of dissatisfaction
you would have with not having the item under
consideration not assigned to the next planning
period (release). For that, 1 indicates lowest
and 9 highest degree of dissatisfaction, respectively.
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Custom
(Other): Project managers may also
decide on other planning criteria that you will
vote on.
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ReleasePlanner®
employs a nine-point scale to articulate your preferences
for items being prioritized. As a rule of thumb, for
each criterion, a rating of "9" corresponds
to the best rating an item can receive, while a rating
of "1" corresponds to the worst rating. In
general, this allows sufficient differentiation between
the items.
To achieve meaningful results, you should try to
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be consistent between the priority assigned to
all items (eventually performing a cross-check
after initial prioritization), |
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use
the “no opinion” option in case you
either do not know or do not understand the item
being prioritized, and |
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try
to diversify as strongly as possible the priority
between items (to avoid uniform treatment). |
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From
the ReleasePlanner® login page, start by entering
your username and password. This information should
have been emailed to you when you were assigned to be
a stakeholder. If you do not know your username or password,
or if you have forgotten either, you can click on the
"Forgot your password?" link for instructions
on how to retrieve this information. |
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| 5.
ACCESS TO ReleasePlanner® MAIN PAGE |
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After
successful login, you will be directed to a listing
of all projects to which you are assigned as a stakeholder.
Click on the name of the project on which you would
like to perform prioritization.
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| 6.
ACCESS TO PLANNING CRITERIA AND ITEMS TO BE PRIORITIZED |
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You
will be directed to the main prioritization page. (1)
From here, select a planning criterion from the list
of tabs (for example, "Urgency") by clicking
on it. Click on [view criterion description] to view
its description.
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(2)
Take a look at the list of items to be prioritized. |
(3) Open [view
feature details] to receive full discription of the
planning object. Clicking on an item
will display more details of its description. |
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The prioritization is facilitated by a drag
and drop feature that allows you to place items
into the designated boxes on the right of the screen.
In
the case of “Cumulative voting” (enforced
by the project or product manager), you have a limited
number of points to be distributed among all items.
In this case, a quota will be displayed in the top right
of the prioritization page.
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If you do not have an opinion about a certain feature,
you can drag it into the "No Opinion" box
below the items list. If you're not certain about how
to vote on certain items, you may also leave them in
the items list and come back to them later.
Each
time you prioritize an item by dropping it into one
of the boxes, your progress is remembered by the system.
Therefore, you may leave the ReleasePlanner® site
and return at a later time, and your priorities will
not be lost.
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| 8.
SUBMITTING YOUR PRIORITIES |
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When
you have finished to prioritize the various items according
to all criteria, click the "Submit Priorities"
button to submit your priorities to the system and make
them available to ReleasePlanner®.
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Clicking
the "Submit Priorities" button
will submit all the priorities you made, from all the
criteria.
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Please
note that your opinion on the priority of items is extremely
important to the overall prioritization process result.
The more qualified and complete (number of items prioritized
for all the defined criteria) your input, the more likely
the suggested planning results will be meaningful.
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A
message will be displayed, confirming that your priorities
were submitted successfully. You may continue to prioritize
or make changes to your existing prioritization if you'd
like. Otherwise, you may click the "Logout"
button on the left-hand menu in order to quit.
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| 10.
PRIORITIZATION AS PART OF THE OVERALL PLANNING PROCESS |
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Prioritization
is an essential part of the overall process of strategic
planning. This overall process includes needs elicitation
(items to be prioritized), definition of planning criteria,
and selection of stakeholders. At the end of this process,
optimized planning alternatives are determined and the
possibility of running what-if scenarios is offered.
The process model is shown below. In this model, rectangles
denote executable tasks, and elliptical shapes refer
to resulting objects.
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