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Definition: 

Often during the Initiation/Immersion phase you will put people at the center of your discovery and Team Priorities is no different. We will place the collaborative team participants on a project at the center of this workshop. The benefit of this workshop is to collectively head-off at the pass any biased or unspoken expectations that could cause significant conflict, missed opportunities or delays. give everyone an equal voice in brainstorming ideas that address a focus question and then having an opportunity to prioritize themes that come from these ideas.

When & Why: 

The purpose of this agreement is to interdependently defined expectations in pre-kickoff on several working topics:

• Communication modes
• Decision-making
• Measuring activities
• What’s successful?
• Resolving conflict
• Prioritizing work

Sometimes projects fail or poor decisions are made because of a lack of information or through groupthink: that project decisions are based on what the most important person or the loudest person thinks. Further, in large programs, some decision-makers may be unable to make informed decisions because they cannot access rich pockets of information. Prioritization workshops try to help teams and leadership reach the best decisions by providing a mechanism for thoughtful team input.

Prioritization workshops can happen at any time, but these activities best happen early in the life of a project, in the initiate and synthesis phases. Some examples of when this may happen include:

• Leadership seeks to develop a roadmap of future prioritized work items
• Stakeholders want to assess what they learned from a unit of work and make future improvements (e.g., sprint retro, PI retro)
• Stalemate over conflicting priorities

Source: NNGOnce you have set expectations it is critical to communicate and socialize the framework of how all participants will engage collaboratively.