A few years ago, I went into a comprehensive school to do a talk about careers in technology – specifically, as a business analyst – with a view to encouraging participation in science, technology engineering and maths subjects as the pupils chose their options for GCSE.

It was a fascinating experience, not least because finding the words to articulate what we do in terms that meant something to 13 and 14-year olds proved to be a delicious challenge. It’s amazing how much jargon we use in our trade, and how little of it means anything to people outside it!

I opened up by taking my iPhone out of my pocket: a 256GB iPhone 5 at the time, then the 128GB iPhone 4 it has just replaced, and pointed out that I’m carrying around 384 million K of computer storage in my pockets. I then contrasted that with the 48K BBC Micro we had on my Dad’s desk when I was their age and pointed out that what I had in my pocket was 8 million times more powerful. And that in my head, I’m still 13 – I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a point that seemed to grab their attention.

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years. This exponential rate of growth is also a powerful symbol of the rate of business change itself, given that pretty much all organisational activity is now underpinned by these rapidly evolving computer systems.

There was a time when the received wisdom of the business analysis profession was to ensure that the computer system reflected the business process, but the digital revolution has turned that dynamic on its head – because as customers, we need to be able to interact with organisations on our mobile devices. Which means business needs to be ‘digital’ – distilled into something you can do with your fingers (or ‘digits’) on a 4.7-inch screen.

So the key challenge for all organisations everywhere is prioritisation. But in every organisation in which I’ve worked, the word ‘priority’ has been used as a synonym for ‘importance’, so I’m sure that the scenario of having 30-50 top priority business changes on the portfolio is familiar to you too!

However, linguistically, the words do not mean the same thing. The clue is in the word ‘priority’ itself – we know everything is critically important, but if you chase two hares you catch none. So, what would you like us to do prior? What would you like us to do first? To begin with?

And herein lies the challenge for organisations: how do you compare the relative priority of a market-disrupting digital product with a new parcel-processing hub, and then again with creaking core system infrastructure and an imminent change to personal data legislation with the risk of massive fines? It’s undeniably difficult.

And it gets more difficult when you consider what you’re working with: ideas that have little definition. You can take a stab at how much effort they will take to deliver, and how much value you will get from them – but you’re likely to be 400% out on the effort, and maybe 1000% out of the value because you’re comparing ideas. And it takes time and resources to turn those ideas into concepts, and exponentially more time and resources to turn them into delivery plans. Before you cut a single line of code.

So how do you prioritise in a meaningful way when you know little about an idea? Not just the delivery, but the analysis of the idea itself? Because it’s unlikely that an organisation has only four strategic changes to pursue: a former employer of mine usually had between 300 and 400 portfolio requests a year to contend with in its portfolio. So even if each idea were dedicated 3 days of attention to understand where it fit in the overall priorities, analysing all of them would require 6 full-time-equivalents (FTE) – half the team at the time (who’d do nothing else). That’s to say nothing of the fact that, even with the investment of 6 FTE, it would take up to 12 months to get to some of them – unacceptable in any organisation.

And yet, somehow, a relative priority is absolutely required for an organisation to start analysing, planning and delivering any of it. Often, in the absence of an alternative, this becomes the subjective view of a ‘star chamber’ of stakeholders – and with that subjectivity comes resistance and political infighting, ultimately elongating the time to value for all of it.

There are, however, a couple of powerful techniques for solving this problem: filtering ideas based on their strategic alignment using a tool called VMOST (Vision, Missions, Objectives, Strategies, Tactics), and WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) to prioritise them in terms of which of the ideas we think will take the organisation furthest fastest towards its desired strategic outcomes (which favours ideas with a shorter time to value).

VMOST

VMOST stands for Vision, Missions, Objectives, Strategies and Tactics. So let’s unpack that a little bit: