Blog: Prioritisation
Why IT and the business always rank priorities differently
Published by Forever Foundry
Ask IT to rank the same twenty initiatives as the business, and you will get two defensible top threes that barely overlap. Neither team is wrong. They are scoring against different criteria.
Two teams, two roadmaps
IT tends to rank by technical risk and dependency. The business tends to rank by commercial urgency. Left to run in parallel, each produces a roadmap that looks complete on its own and contradicts the other the moment budget gets discussed.
Where the gap comes from
This is exactly the pattern that surfaced during Slid3rs™ work with Merck, where Mauricio Camargo needed IT and the business to see one ranking, not two, before a credible case for investment could be made. The gap between the two scores was not noise. It was the clearest evidence in the whole exercise of where the real disagreement sat.
What a shared ranking needs
Slid3rs™ scores every initiative against the same criteria, with both functions scoring in the same room against the same list. A 3+ point gap between two functions on the same item is not a problem to hide. It is the single most useful piece of information in the entire session, because it tells you exactly which conversation to have before you commit budget.
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