{"id":20123,"date":"2008-11-21T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/11\/21\/the-great-thing-about-priorities-is-that-you-can-always-go-one-higher\/"},"modified":"2008-11-21T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-21T10:00:00","slug":"the-great-thing-about-priorities-is-that-you-can-always-go-one-higher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20081121-00\/?p=20123","title":{"rendered":"The great thing about priorities is that you can always go one higher"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The phenomenon I call <i>priority inflation<\/i> has spread to product planning documents as well. Back in the old days, there were three priority levels:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Priority&nbsp;1: <i>must have<\/i>. If you don&#8217;t accomplish a priority&nbsp;1 item, you may as well just cancel the project because it ain&#8217;t shipping. <\/li>\n<li>Priority&nbsp;2: <i>should have<\/i>. If you don&#8217;t accomplish a priority&nbsp;2 item, the product is significantly weaker, but you can still ship it. <\/li>\n<li>Priority&nbsp;3: <i>nice to have<\/i>. If you don&#8217;t accomplish a priority&nbsp;3 item, it&#8217;s not quite as awesome as it could have been, but it&#8217;s still a good product. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> Over the past few years, I&#8217;ve seen a shift in the labelling of priorities in planning documents. A new priority has been introduced: <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com\/techtracks\/\"> <i>Priority Zero<\/i><\/a>. Nobody has explained to me what <i>Priority&nbsp;0<\/i> means, but I assume somebody invented it to emphasize that the feature is <i>even more critical than priority&nbsp;1<\/i>. Mind you, I&#8217;m not sure what could be more important to a project than &#8220;If we don&#8217;t do this, we&#8217;re all fired.&#8221; Maybe &#8220;If we don&#8217;t do this, the earth will explode.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p> As you might expect, priority inflation has a trickle-down effect. People whose features had been assigned priority&nbsp;1 said, &#8220;Hey, how come my feature isn&#8217;t priority&nbsp;0? It&#8217;s just as critical as that other guy&#8217;s feature.&#8221; Soon, everything that was priority&nbsp;1 got reclassified as priority&nbsp;0. Nature abhors a vacuum, so all the priority&nbsp;2 items got reclassified as priority&nbsp;1, and the priority&nbsp;3 items got reclassified as priority&nbsp;2. <\/p>\n<p> In the end, nothing changed aside from the names on the buckets. It&#8217;s been years since I&#8217;ve seen a planning document with any priority&nbsp;3 items. It&#8217;s all zero, one, and two now. <\/p>\n<p> Wait, I lied. The meaning of the last bucket (the former priority&nbsp;3, now named priority&nbsp;2) has changed. It used to be things that would be <i>nice to have<\/i>, but now it appears to be used for <i>something other people suggested which I didn&#8217;t think was important, but I didn&#8217;t want to be mean and reject it outright, so I&#8217;m listing it here to make those people feel better and showing that their &#8220;voice was heard,&#8221; but don&#8217;t kid yourself; we&#8217;re not going to do it<\/i>. In other words, priority&nbsp;2 means <i>No<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p> I give it three years before somebody decides that an issue is even more critical than priority&nbsp;0 and labels it <i>Priority&nbsp;&minus;1<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p> <b>Epilogue<\/b>: After I originally wrote this entry, I&#8217;ve learned that some teams have indeed come up with a priority level even more important than Priority&nbsp;0. It&#8217;s called Priority <i>Now<\/i>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The phenomenon I call priority inflation has spread to product planning documents as well. Back in the old days, there were three priority levels: Priority&nbsp;1: must have. If you don&#8217;t accomplish a priority&nbsp;1 item, you may as well just cancel the project because it ain&#8217;t shipping. Priority&nbsp;2: should have. If you don&#8217;t accomplish a priority&nbsp;2 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-20123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>The phenomenon I call priority inflation has spread to product planning documents as well. Back in the old days, there were three priority levels: Priority&nbsp;1: must have. If you don&#8217;t accomplish a priority&nbsp;1 item, you may as well just cancel the project because it ain&#8217;t shipping. Priority&nbsp;2: should have. If you don&#8217;t accomplish a priority&nbsp;2 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}