Announcing our new App - WSJF Priority Calculator for Jira!
25 Feb 2020 - David Hackman
Hi, David from TeamUp Labs again to share some very exciting news with you. We're delighted to announce that we've launched WSJF Priority Calculator for Jira. The app is available to trial now here.
In case you don't know the WSJF technique, it stands for Weighted Shortest Job First. This is a data driven prioritization technique. It works by applying relative scores for various levers, and then dividing those scores based on estimated size to provide a rank. The higher the rank, the more valuable the item to your customers.
This technique has been applied most famously in the SAFe Agile Framework, but can be used without SAFe as a way to improve the prioritization process and remove common problems. From what I've seen, WSJF can prevent the Highest Paid or Loudest person from dominating the conversation. It reduces the impact emotion can have, in deference of data achieved by consensus.
The great news is the app requires zero configuration. You choose from any of your existing Jira issue filters and click prioritize. You will then enter scores for each WSJF lever (Business Value, Time Criticality, Risk Reduction and Estimated Size). When you've entered all the scores you want to, click View Results. You don't have to score every issue in your filter if you don't want to.
On the results tab, you can see the issues you did score ordered by rank. Your teams should pick up the highest scoring issues first. The highest scoring issues are the ones that will provide your customers the most value.
If you need to tweak anything, you can go back to the Edit tab and change values. The app saves the values against the issues, so you don't need to worry about re-entering them each time.
The results tab also has some charts to enable a different interpretation of the rank. There is a Do Now Do Later graph, important, valuable work will bubble up to the top right. The hotter the temperature the more valuable the work is, based on the WSJF score. There are also histograms to break down the distribution of each of the WSJF components.
We have lots of ideas on how to keep evolving the app, but we'd also welcome your feedback. Please trial it in your Jira Cloud instance and let us know how you get on. You can contact us using Twitter - @Teamuplabs.