Initiative Prioritizer

When to use

Use whenever more initiatives exist than capacity to do them, and the current prioritization method is either informal (whoever argues loudest, or the most senior person's preference) or a single flat "priority: high/medium/low" tag that doesn't actually rank anything against anything else.

What it does

Scores every initiative on RICE (Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort) via a bundled calculator for a defensible relative ranking, then overlays a cost-of-delay check — because RICE alone ranks by expected value per unit of effort and says nothing about urgency, which means a slower-but-time-sensitive initiative (a closing market window, a compliance deadline) can get silently mis-sequenced if the RICE rank is applied mechanically.

Method

1. Score Reach: how many customers/users/dollars this touches in a defined time period (e.g., per quarter) — use a real number, not a category.
2. Score Impact on the standard RICE scale: 3 = massive, 2 = high, 1 = medium, 0.5 = low, 0.25 = minimal. Resist inflating everything to "high impact" — this is the step most prioritization exercises fudge.
3. Score Confidence as a percentage reflecting how solid the evidence behind reach/impact estimates actually is — 100% only for measured/proven effects, 80% for strong indirect evidence, 50% or below for a hypothesis with little backing.
4. Estimate Effort in person-weeks (or another consistent unit) — including the realistic full cost, not just the most visible engineering piece.
5. Estimate cost of delay for each initiative where it applies: monthly value lost by not shipping it now (lost revenue, compounding risk, closing window, deadline penalty). Zero is a valid answer for initiatives with no real urgency.
6. Run the bundled calculator (scripts/rice_prioritizer.py) to get the RICE score per initiative and a flag whenever the highest-cost-of-delay initiative isn't also the top RICE-ranked one.
7. Resolve flagged conflicts explicitly with the decision-maker: is the urgency real enough to sequence ahead of a higher-RICE item, or is it manufactured urgency that shouldn't override the evidence-based ranking? Write down the answer and why.
8. Publish the ranked list with the reasoning visible (scores, not just the final order) so the prioritization can be challenged and defended on the actual inputs, not just trusted blindly.