Cracking The Impact Effort (Value) Prioritization Matrix Secret
Do you want a quick way to find low-hanging fruit in your project? Find out how to identify and prioritize these tasks with a free professional template.
What is the Impact Effort Matrix
Impact Effort (or Value Effort, or Value Complexity) matrix is a lean prioritization tool that helps you visually divide the backlog into four parts depending on the task ROI:
- Quick Wins that provide maximum benefits with low efforts required.
- Major Projects that provide long-term returns but require more investments.
- Fill-Ins that are cheap to implement but don’t give much in return.
- Time-Sinks that require a lot of investments and provide minimal benefits.
Who can use the Impact Effort Matrix
Anybody can use the Impact Effort matrix to prioritize anything from personal to-dos to complex business projects to maximize productivity.
How to use the Impact Effort Matrix Template
1. Prepare a list of tasks to prioritize
Decide on the backlog scope requiring prioritization. Get the tasks into the template by:
- Importing from a task tracker
- Importing from a spreadsheet
- Creating new tasks in the template
2. Evaluate by the whole team
Each task must be estimated from 0 to 3 by two criteria: Impact and Effort. Best when evaluated by every member of the project.
- Impact — How big is the value for the main business objective?
0 — no impact
1 — low
2 — medium
3 — high
- Effort — How many resources will the implementation require?
0 — no real efforts
1 — low
2 — medium
3 — high
3. Discuss the priorities
After evaluation, all the tasks will be placed into the four quadrants according to the scores they got:
- Quick Wins — high impact and low effort.
- Major Projects — high impact and high effort.
- Fill-Ins — low impact and low effort.
- Thankless Tasks — low impact and high effort.
Discuss with the team whether you all agree with the priorities you got. Don’t take the results into work unquestioningly.