The truth about project priorities

April 29, 2022 I recently completed the course “The Wisdom Within” with the Adelaide School of Practical Philosophy. One of the topics that we discussed was “The Desire for Truth”. I was particularly struck by this Indian parable:

One day a king called one of his ministers and told him:

“Go, good fellow and bring here all the men of the town that were born blind.” When the blind men had been assembled, the rajah told a servant: “Show these men an elephant.”

The servant did as he was commanded, and he made one blind man touch the head of the elephant, another the ear, another the trunk, a tusk, a foot, the back, the tail, and the tuft of the tail ; and to each one he said that he was touching the elephant.

After this the rajah went to those blind men and asked them: “Have you studied the elephant? Tell me your conclusions.” The man who had touched the head said: “It is like a pot.” The one who had touched the ear said: “It is like a fan.” And so for the others the trunk became a plough; a tusk, a ploughshare; a foot, a pillar; the back, a granary: the tail, a pestle; and the tuft of the tail a besom. And each blind man thought that what he had touched was the elephant. Then they began to argue with each other and to quarrel, saying, “An elephant is like this - no, it is not, it is like this - 1 tell you it is not” ; and so on, until in the end they came to blows. And the rajah enjoyed very much that scene.

“In the same way, brethren,” said the Master, “these men are blind, have not seen the Truth, but they assume that they have seen the Truth.”

In our session, we discussed the parable in context of the search for truth in the Socratic method of dialogue. That is; if two people sit down to have a discussion, they should both acknowledge that they are seeking to uncover the objective truth. The parable is a reminder that we have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on our limited and subjective experience, while at the same time dismissing and ignoring other peoples truth based on their limited and subjective experiences.

There are many applications to my personal life, but it also made me reflect on something we all deal with in our work lives: stakeholders. Any person with an interest or concern in the project is going to have their own version of the truth. Truths most commonly come into conflict with each other when it comes to prioritising the importance of certain items. The first thing that comes to my mind is prioritising items in the product backlog if you are implementing agile project management methodology.

A product backlog can include new features, changes to existing features, bug fixes, infrastructure changes or other items that are important to the accomplishment of an outcome. The product backlog is the authoritative to do list for the project and the many stakeholders (as well as team members) of the project can have their individual priorities for the order of that backlog. One thought provoking method of eliciting priorities that I have seen is to bring all of the team members together and ask them to give a rating of how difficult they think each item will be to complete. The ratings are 1, 3, 5, 10 and 12. The purpose of the exercise is to get the team on the same page about how long it will take parts of the team to complete certain items. As opposed to just creating a points system for the hardest tasks.

Working independently, there are many hats to wear. You are in charge of the client process from start to finish, and without a dedicated project manager, managing competing stakeholder priorities falls on you. I’d love to hear from others navigating this — how do you determine project scope, manage feedback and prioritise features? What happens when scope creep arrives in a round of feedback?