How to decide what to work on next
Most teams pick the next thing by feel. Here is a rule people actually follow.
Open any thread titled how do you decide what to work on next and the most upvoted answers are some version of:
Nope.
I never use any.
Alphabetical order.
We yell at each other until one person has not been defeated.
Read that as data, not as a joke. The frameworks lost. RICE, MoSCoW, ICE and weighted scoring are widely known and almost universally abandoned. The stated reason is consistent: scoring produced a number that everybody then argued around anyway, so it added a step without removing the argument.
A rule that does not pretend to be more than it is
- Rank the list. Not labels. A sequence.
- Draw a line. Above it is what you are doing now. Moving something up means something else moves down.
- One person moves things. Anyone can suggest. One person decides and orders, and that right is handed over whole, never shared.
- When two things cannot be separated, name what would tell them apart. Does it bring money in? Is a client waiting? Can it be done this week? Write the answer down. Next time you are stuck, you have a vocabulary.
What the rule costs
- Somebody has to actually do the ranking. Sharing it between two people is the most common way the order goes stale.
- You have to say what moves down when something moves up. That part is uncomfortable, which is why most tools quietly skip it.
- You need things to age out. Anything below the line that has not moved in a month should disappear on its own. Otherwise the list becomes a graveyard.
That is the whole rule. It is shorter than RICE, and people will actually do it.