If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority

If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority on Jay Paroline - Grooveshark Dev

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:32:09 GMT

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Getting your priorities right

Being Cellfish — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:43:11 GMT

I think an important thing about being agile a great developer is to make sure your backlog is correctly

re: If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority

(a completly different) Mark — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 02:05:11 GMT

@stephen: those 'context-switch' penalties can be reduced when it is self imposed; you can plan when you don the switch. Similar to what one does at the end of the day, you find a good stopping point, which will minimize the time loss when you start up again the next day.

re: If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority

Matt Doar — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:58:49 GMT

This reminds me of something I wrote in a book a few years ago.

Severity Inflation

"In most companies and projects, limited resources mean that as the ship date for a release approaches, only bugs with Severity 1 and 2 get fixed; the others are closed or deferred. Over time this practice leads to severity inflation. Someone entering a bug knows that this bug won't stop the product, but she remembers that none of her Severity 3 bugs got fixed last time and she really wants this one fixed, so she makes it a Severity 2. In the extreme, by a process of induction, all bugs become Severity 1 bugs and the purpose of the

field is lost."

Whether it's called Severity or Priority or anything else, it's always got an invisible word in front of it - who's priority it is.

E.g. Engineering Priority, Customer Priority, CFO priority.

~Matt

("Practical Development Environments", O'Reilly, 2005)

re: If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority

IMil — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:54:47 GMT

A whole day passed without a Dilbert reference?

Let me fix it:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2007-07-26/

re: If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority

Kip — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:10:57 GMT

In my company's bug tracking, we have priority 1-4. But 2, 3, 4 are basically treated exactly the same (neglected). So the majority of bugs are priority 1. But then that must have gotten confusing, so we created several flags that can be appended to sev1 bugs: mustfix, mandatory, and HMA. Mandatory and mustfix sound like the same thing, but for whatever reason mandatory is more serious. HMA is "high management attention", which basically means a customer is threatening to close their contract, so your boss's boss knows about this issue and requires status updates at least twice a day.

re: If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority

John — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:17:17 GMT

At a previous company we used to have priorities in traffic light colours: Red top priority then descending from Amber to Green. This worked well as conceptually red means danger, as in get this one fixed first! Unfortunately everything was being entered in red, management decided we needed even higher priorities so we got grey and black!

re: If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority

Miles Archer — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:01:19 GMT

Yep. Good job on this. I think I just annoy my management with this kind of thing. When it comes right down to it, just about everyone wants 10 pounds of stuff in a 5 pound bag.

re: If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority

Julian — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:09:15 GMT

I am very impressed that your management was able to take the hint and start managing priorities (and you, for getting the hint across successfully.)

I had a manager who would give me new "top priority" tasks every day - tasks that would take more than a day to complete, with the result that nothing could ever get finished.

I threatened to write a script that deleted any email from him containing the text "top priority", "most urgent", or "drop what you are doing for this", but I only had limited success in changing his behaviour.

re: If everything is top priority, then nothing is top priority

Milo — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:21:33 GMT

It all boils down to corporate culture. There are urgent tasks, important tasks, and nice-to-haves. But most managers cannot distinguish one from the other and sometimes no matter how much explanation you make they just don't get it. You can't blame if the company doesn't have sound and good project management philosophy, training,etc. They might not have the budget to implement CMMI level 5, nor the process engineering department, quality audit department, etc.

In my case, I decided to work in a company that has all the things above and value project management and software development lifecycle at a high degree. Of course, there will still be projects that suck, but overall, the good management backbone makes everything easy.

I remember 8 years ago when I was still in college, I would research of the most desirable and best place companies to work for, and I did everything possible to work in the top 50 in the list.