Sunday, February 15, 2009

Agile Thinking – Enhance Personal Productivity

It’s a tough world right now, most organizations are being asked to get more done with less. In an earlier post I talked about MoSCoW ratings as a way to prioritize user stories. MoSCoW ratings can be used to prioritize many things. Prioritizing tasks with MoSCoW ratings in a to-do is list is just one way of using Agile thinking to boost personal productivity.

When I am overwhelmed I use MoSCoW to prioritize personal tasks.


M - MUST do this task. In this context MUST is similar to Steven Covey’s Important / Urgent Quadrant. Schedule time to handle this task now.

S - SHOULD do this task. The world won’t end if it is not done today. But it’s a task that if it does not get done could lead to problems. This task should remain in your personal task backlog (to do list).

C - COULD do this task. This task is neither urgent nor important now. This task could remain in your personal task backlog (to do list) or be delegated.

W - WON'T do this task. Doing this task won’t move the project forward or provide any value. Delete this task.

We can’t add more hours in the day but we can spend the time we do have on the right things By looking applying MoSCoW ratings to tasks and responsibilities, you can make sure you are focused on the right priorities and remove waste by not spending time on needless tasks.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Patrick, this is really useful. People are looking for practical ideas and suggestions and I will point this out to people on my blog.

Good stuff

Ron Rosenhead
www.ronrosenhead.co.uk

Anonymous said...

Hi Patrick,

I think the W is probably one of the most important items. Working in iterations you don't want to be bogged down with tasks that shouldn't have been done in the first place.

Identifying non-entities is a useful skill.

Regards,
David
http://www.jacksguides.com