If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority
Read somewhere
Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.
Andrew Grove
IT projects are known that they often ship late or even fail.
If you are involved in a web IT project you can get a 100% success rate for shipping on time.
The secret is to have priorities on all your features. Rigorously.
Priorities on features you want to release. Priorities on features of features. Any by priorities I almost only mean what’s important to your business. Which features are truly essential for your business. And what features are not. Are your tasks / stories and features annotated by business-value? Not? Then do it know and know what’s important.
Then make a rough roadmap and only plan the first milestone in more or less detail. Make sure that each and every feature and feature of a feature gets prioritized by business-value and time it takes to being implement. Your team will tell you.
Then cut. Cut features you do not need. Cut features of features. And ship on time.
That’s essential. It’s more important to start and have something working right from the beginning than something where everything is implemented at the same time and nothing gets finished.
Your team and your business will be healthier if you got priorities on everything :)
I tend to use Scrum story cards to represent features and the planning game to get a consensus from management and team regarding the business-value [1]. It often helps to negotiate features on a board and move them around. Visually prioritizing features is way more effective for people than just having a text document.
[1] http://www.agile42.com/cms/pages/poker/