How to Rank Epics & their Backlog Items
Darren Carpenter
For example, our PM's use Epics to enter and organize their backlog.
I know how to Rank epics, but that doesn't change the rank of the
backlog items in the Backlog. It also doesn't change their Rank in
Release Planning.
I then thought maybe I wasn't using V1 as it was designed. Maybe
Ranking epics only Ranks the epics and not the BI's.
In the Backlog, we have 1000's of Backlog items. I use a filter to
find the records I want to Rank to the top, but when I remove the
filter the backlog items aren't ranked at the top. Once the filter is
removed, the ranking seems to only rank within the filter.
I'm getting the complaint from the Teams and PM's that it is difficult
to Rank items and I can't seem to find an easy want to rank a large
group of BI's in an even larger set of BI's.
Please help.
Wortman, Bret D.
Backlog items go through four stages of development on my projects. They start as ideas (preschool), and as they get properly scoped down to where each could theoretically be done in a day or two of coding they move on to elementary school. They are then rephrased to become user stories and move into high school. Once we're happy with their phrasing we add acceptance criteria and they graduate to university. It's only at that last stage that they are added to V1 and become eligible for addition to the backlog.
Does prioritization happen earlier? Absolutely. But it happens with sticky notes on a wall. Things are just changing & fluxing too fast before that point for us to manage the work in a computer-based tool. The team gets confused by the constantly-shifting backlog, or at least those who monitor the product backlog get confused. And you're absolutely right that as the size grows, so does the complexity of shifting just-added items around within the priority scheme.
Within the tool itself, I only use the default sort order and manually drag items around to set their priority. Everything else, I find, just confuses people. I don't set High/Medium/Low values or anything else. Where the item falls in the default sort is where it is in the priority scheme.
It's worth noting that I suggested to a V1 rep at Agilepalooza DC that they consider a setting which would allow new backlog items to either be added to the bottom of the backlog (which is the current behavior) or to the top, which would make it easier to localize that item without lots of dragging, since it's my experience that most items being added are either extremely important or extremely unimportant -- very little falls in the middle.
Bret
Please help.
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JasonF
1. Use the drag and drop sort
With no filters or sorting applied, push all of the "top" priority
items to the top of your list using the Order column, then drag and
drop them in the correct priority order. Then you can apply filters
for grooming only what you want.
2. Use a custom Rank field
Add a custom field called Rank, and add numbers as appropriate. This
helps if you ever export to excel for reporting or distribution to non-
V1 users.
On Sep 28, 6:45 pm, Darren Carpenter <sharonanddar...@gmail.com>
wrote:
