In the hustle and bustle of daily tasks, mastering the art of prioritization is crucial for achieving your objectives effectively. 📈 That’s why today, we’re exploring the RICE method—a popular approach to setting priorities that ensures your efforts are aligned with what matters most.
🤸♂️ RICE – Time to get Agile!
This is a popular tool for prioritising a product backlog in agile projects. It helps you arrange tasks and features based on their importance and impact on users. 🧑🤝🧑
RICE stands for:
1️⃣ Reach — the number of users a task will affect.
2️⃣ Impact — the level of impact the task will have on users or the company (estimated on a scale of 1 to 3).
3️⃣ Confidence — the certainty of your estimates regarding impact and reach (on a scale of 0-100%).
4️⃣ Effort — the estimated time and resources needed to complete the task.
💡 RICE has its advantages, such as:
➕ It’s easy to understand.
➕ It allows for objective assessment of tasks.
➕ It focuses on value for both the user and the company.
However, it also has some drawbacks, like:
➖ Difficulty in estimating certain factors (especially subjective ones, such as impact and confidence).
➖ It may not be suitable for all types of projects.
🤔 How to assess the RICE factors?
As always, we’re here with explanations! 🏃♀️💨
1️⃣ Reach:
- Determine the number of users the task will impact.
- Consider both direct and indirect users.
- Use the same unit for all tasks (e.g., number of users, number of accounts).
2️⃣ Impact:
- Assess the level of impact the task will have on users or the company.
- Use a scale (e.g., 1-3, some also use quarters and halves) or descriptive terms (e.g., low, medium, high).
- Take into account both positive and negative effects of the task.
3️⃣ Confidence:
- Assess the certainty of your estimates.
- Use a percentage scale (e.g., 50%, 80%, 100%). Below 50% is a very low estimate, and we don’t want to be guessing. ❌ Aim for 50% and above.
- Consider the availability of information, the team’s experience, and the complexity of the task.
4️⃣ Effort:
- Estimate the time and resources needed to complete the task.
- Use the same unit for all tasks (e.g., Story Points, man-days).
- Take into account all stages of the task, from start to finish.
ℹ️ A Story Point relates specifically to tasks carried out by a particular team. It describes the standard pace of task completion, which could be, for example, 6 hours and 15 minutes.
A man-day is one person’s working day.
🤓 Time for some math
You can calculate the RICE score using a simple formula 👇
ℹ️ RICE = (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort
A higher RICE score = a higher priority.
However, remember that the result is only a suggestion, and we’re not prisoners of it! ❌
A Project Manager may ultimately decide on different priorities than those indicated by the score.
📐 Let’s crunch some numbers!
How does this work in practice? 👇
For example – we have two tasks, and we need to choose the higher priority one. Let’s discuss it using an online game as an example.
👉 Adding a login feature to the game.
- We estimate Reach to be 10,000 users.
- Impact is high (a login feature is valuable — it allows users to save their game progress, and we get their data in return).
- Confidence — of course, we’re confident ✨
- Effort is estimated to be 7 days.
Or…
👉 Implementing a payment system for this game. This feature allows users to purchase character customisation options, like additional outfits.
- We estimate Reach to be 2,000 users (fewer people typically pay for online games).
- Impact is considered critical (it’s our revenue source 🤯).
- Confidence — we’re sure of it.
- Effort, for example, is the same as in login feature – 7 days.
➗ Calculations:
- Priority of Task 1: (10,000 x 2 x 1) / 7 = approx. 2,857,
- Priority of Task 2: (2,000 x 3 x 1) / 7 = approx. 857.
How to Interpret the Results? 🤓
According to the calculations, Task 1 is the priority, despite having a lower Impact on the company. 🙌 In this case, Reach determined the outcome.
What do you think of RICE? Will you put it into practice? Or perhaps you’d like to learn about more methods like this one?
Let us know! 💌
