Basically, all projects in a company (or epics, as we like to call them) need to be prioritized with respect to each other. That way you can find out which one is most important and thus gets the prize.
Definition: epic
Huh, an epic? An epic is a functional description of an independent set of features, which has value by itself. So, an epic is a bunch of stories that have something to do with each other.
Priority poker
For a single team, a product owner defines the priority of epics and subsequently stories. For a whole company, the product owners need to find out the relative importance of their epics.
But how do you prioritize epics in an objective way? Most product owners like to think that their own project is the most important and therefore deserves all necessary resources. However, usually, that's impossible. So, either a single deity decides what is most important, or you can use a more democratic model by playing Priority Poker.
Priority poker is very similar to Scrum planning poker, but maybe a little more complicated. Like planning is based on story points, priority can be defined by priority points. The number of priority points is defined by the weighted result of business value versus complexity for each epic.
- Business value – business value is the weighted result of predictions for consumer satisfaction, sales and savings, which an epic might create directly or by enabling other epics.
- Complexity – complexity is the mixture of effort and risk that is involved with the actual development of a given epic.
So, as product owners, you should agree on a certain generic value matrix that defines the values for business value and complexity. For each epic, calculate the priority individually and use the rules of planning poker to create a single company project backlog.
