Prioritizing Projects

Our group takes on a variety of projects from many sources, both internal and external to our organization. Because of the number or project requests we get, we need to prioritize our projects so that the most critical and beneficial ones get worked on first.

To help us prioritize, we came up with a few criteria that we evaluate projects on.

Critical Bug Fixes Come First

Whenever a bug comes into our tracking system, we determine its urgency based on the goals for the individual project. If a bug is deemed “Critical” by the group, it immediately gets pushed to the top of the priority list and is addressed right away. Other bugs are evaulated during our monthly planning meetings and are addressed accordingly.

Our Tools Take Priority

To keep our group as productive as possible, we need to have the needed tools in place. For this reason, tools that we need for development are placed at a higher priority than other projects.

Projects are Evaluated on Priority Matrix

The group goes through any project requests and determines their rank using the following priority matrix.

Criteria	Low end of scale	High end of scale
Biggest Dollar Contributor	You don’t pay our salaries	You do pay our salaries
Challenging Problem Solving	“Hello World”	We need to hire an expert
Deadline	“Whenever you get to it”	“We need this yesterday”
Diversification	Same ole, same ole	New hotness
End User Impact	Less than 10	More than 50,000
Impact to Stake Holders	“It would be nice if…”	“We need this…bad”
Management Direction	“Not in your job description”	“We need you to do this”
Most Interesting to Group	yawn	Google would be jealous
New Technology	HTML	Something not invented yet
Potential Profitablility	$0	$$$$$$
PR Value	Nobody knows it’s happening	“Front page News”
Time to Complete	See you next decade	See you in 10 minutes

Final Priority Determined by Us

The priority matrix is mainly used as a guide to make sure we address all aspects of a project. The final decision for all projects is reserved for our group.