If you can’t use points or it’s too hard to calculate waste, you still have several choices to rank your projects. Try pairwise comparison, single elimination, or double elimination.
5.8.1 Use Pairwise Comparison to Rank Projects
For pairwise comparison, make a simple list of all the projects. For our purposes, a project is a unique release of some collected set of
USEOTHERCOMPARISONMETHODS TORANKYOURPROJECTS 79
features. (That specification may be vague where you work.) If you wrote your projects on stickies when you were collecting all the work, as in Section3.1,Know What Work to Collect, on page40, this part is easy.
If you didn’t make stickies or index cards before, make them now.
Place all the stickies on a wall. If you’re using index cards, put them on a table. Take two stickies. Hold them up so everyone can see them, and ask, “Which one of these is first compared to each other?” Of the two projects, one is a higher priority than the other. Put the higher- priority project at the top of the list, and put the next one underneath it. Now, take the third project. Compare it to the first project: “Which one of these is first compared to each other?” If the third is higher priority than the first, put it at the top of the list. If the first one is still top priority, compare the third to the second. Keep going until you’ve looked at all the projects and compared them to each other. At the end, you have ranked your entire project list.
This is just like what the eye doctor does when you’re being fitted for new glasses. My eye doctor says, “Which one of these is clearer: this one or that one?” first for the left eye, then for the right eye, and then finally for both. You have to make only one decision at a time. Imagine if you had to look at each image with each eye before she changed both at the same time. Too confusing.
5.8.2 Consider Single- or Double-Elimination Tournament Decision Making
Sometimes you have groups of projects and need to pit some projects against others before looking at the entire picture. This is especially helpful if you have groups of projects serving different constituencies.
A colleague in an IT group explained, “We have internal projects for our finance and sales groups, but we have external projects that allow our customers to update their information via our website. We have to organize the projects into internal projects and external projects, eval- uate them inside their groups, and then compare against the groups.”
Single-elimination or double-elimination tournaments may help.
In single-elimination tournaments, such as in tennis tournaments, you start by pitting each project against another project. The “winner”—
the higher-priority project—goes on to the next round. In the previous single-elimination picture, you can see of the eight projects, “Project 3”
comes out as the winner.
USEOTHERCOMPARISONMETHODS TORANKYOURPROJECTS 80 Project 1
Project 2
Project 3
Project 4
Project 5
Project 6
Project 7
Project 8
Project 1
Project 3
Project 6
Project 8
Project 3
Project 8
Project 3
Figure 5.1: Single-Elimination Tournament
If you have groups of projects and don’t know which group to do first, single elimination is a top-down approach to choosing.3
However, you might need a slightly different approach to eliminating projects from consideration. In that case, try double elimination, espe- cially if you have many options for which projects you can staff.
Double elimination is a form of pairwise comparison and helps every- one feel as if they have fairly evaluated all projects against one another, because it forces all projects to be compared to each other. In the pre- vious picture, the initially “losing” projects run off each other on the bottom. A project isn’t “out” until it loses twice. Double elimination helps you see the first project and the second project. If you have many projects in competition for the next slots down, consider using points to help you see the relative business value of each project.
3. Enthiosys has collaboration games for deciding about the relative ranking of projects, similar to single and double elimination.
DON’TUSE ROITORANK 81 Project 1
Project 2 Project 3
Project 4
Project 1
Project 3
Project 2
Project 3
Project 2 (L)
Project 4 (L)
Project 6 (L)
Project 2 Project 5
Project 6
Project 5
Project 3
Project 2
Figure 5.2: Double-Elimination Tournament