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The BackstoryThe other day, I was having a conversation with several people about culling a 200+ item backlog for a legacy application that is being sunset (and the successor of which is already live in some capacity). A business person was arguing that we needed to take the entire backlog into a meeting to vet all 200 stories individually to determine which still need to be implemented. There was a shorter, 70 item list that the business met around each week to prioritize. They hadn’t looked at the other 130 stories in months. The application did have about a dozen stakeholders who’s business units could be affected either positively or negatively by the prioritization decisions that came out of the meeting. At the same time, to sift through more than 200 stories and decide which stay and which don’t, we were looking at four hours of meetings with several very expensive attendees. I argued that we should take the shorter list into the meeting. I was in a position only to advise on this one, and I didn’t get my way. What ensued was four hours of - you guessed it - tedium. The majority of those stories had little or no intrinsic meaning to the deciders in the room. We spent a surprising amount of time guessing why something was on the list, how many years it had been there, who really wanted it, and why. Tellingly, the end result was a roughly prioritized list of about 70 stories. My TakePrioritization should not be a mind-numbing meeting (or, worse, series of meetings). It should be speedy, efficient and sometimes painful. But that’s the point, isn’t it? We’re prioritizing so we can make the best decisions possible with limited resources (which include our own time). Here’s what I would have done (and, for that matter, what I have done) in a situation like this:
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