Putting First Things First

I was listening to an audiobook while I was running today by John C. Maxwell called “Thinking for a Change”. In his book he talks about how to prioritize. He states that our priority shouldn’t be “to do the hardest things first, or the easiest things first, or the most urgent things first.” His goal is to do the first things first.

So what does John C. Maxwell mean by the first things first. What he means is doing the things that bring the highest value first.

I found this particularly interesting on how it could relate to the SCRUM framework. Often when I’m talking with clients we are assessing the highest-value / highest-risk features to put into a sprint. What often happens is that the business value is lost in this evaluation and the technical complexity becomes the driver. The defacto position becomes the highest-risk technical items are the highest-value business needs.

A prime example of this is a web site that we were recently working on had a link to a PDF that users could download, fill out, and fax into the company. The company then had internal people take this information and enter it into a system. The labour costs associated with this were enormous. The uncanny thing about it is that the process had been automated on the web site already!! By removing this link the company could save hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is certainly not a difficult technical task and could easily fit into a sprint – but somehow other important features that could not be realized in the short-term continued to be worked on.

That link no longer exists on the site – but I wonder how many other times is this opportunity available and how can I focus clients I work with to think about ROI for them.