Prioritization Rubric
Role: Lead, CS Content Strategy & Design
Timeline: 1 week dev, 3 months testing
Tools: Google Workspace
Stakeholders: CS Training
Problem: Team members expressed feeling like a content farm and struggling to prioritize projects coming down the funnel.
Solution: I delivered a weighted prioritization rubric and process. During the pilot phase, I shadowed team members in their kick-off conversations, and iterated on the final rubric and process based on their experience and feedback.
Prep
I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, so I went out on the web and found a weighted rubric template and took it into Google Sheets. I customized the rows to our needs and added a bit more weight to Effort, Scalability, and Need, as these would have the biggest impact on our team’s ability to deliver.
Impact wasn’t in the first draft, but was added later after we realized the need for the category in feedback sessions. But here’s where we landed for our final pilot:
Not pictured: Scoring broke down into three recommendations: Training Solution, Non-Training Solution, and Case-by-Case.
Pilot phase
The team used the rubric in stakeholder conversations to help drive strategic decision-making. I shadowed these sessions when able so I could see the overall impact on the rubric in the conversation, and the team calibrated on training needs in each planning session.
As a team, we briefly considered asking the stakeholders submitting requests to use the rubric themselves to determine the best option. However, we ultimately decided this was asking stakeholders to know more about how our team functions than was strictly necessary and left it with the team.
Before closing out the pilot, we got together as a team and wrote a list of stakeholder questions to go with the rubric to help guide the conversation in the event of new members joining the team.
What I’d do differently…
When it was written with four items, it gave more meaningful scores that were easier to justify and interpret. Adding the fifth item (need) ultimately started watering down the scores and making it more subjective — which is what we were trying to get away from.
Today, I’d combine Impact and Alignment, as I feel Impact can easily be redefined to include impact to advisors or strategic goals/OKRs/etc. This would balance out the weight distribution and make the rubric more useful.