Priorities (was RE: Yahoo has no staff tech writers)

["Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

John Posada <JPosada -at- book -dot- com> wrote:

 I simply said
>that when it comes to priorities, I place them in the that order.
>
>If I only have time for one of the priorities, #1 comes first...if time for
>two of them, then 1 and 2 come first....etc. If I have time to get to 6,
>then I try to follow the rules as much as I can, but not at the expense of
>the ones preceding. 
>
>

John,

Forgive me for taking the above quote out of its intended context, but it brings up an interesting question.

It is a common--maybe standard--practice to sort a list of needs/tasks/bugs/whatever into A, B, and C priorities, and then to say, "We'll do the A list first; then, if we have time, we'll do the B list; then, if we have time, we'll do the C list."

I have some trouble with that approach, and I think this may be what's bothering Bonnie, too (I'm not speaking for her, however).

Let's take the example of software development. If adding new features is always an A item and fixing what is already in the product is always a B item, and improving usability is always a C item, you end up with MS Word. Unfortunately, that model only works if you have as much clout in the market as Microsoft has. For the rest of the world, that's a formula for failure.

The issue is that nobody ever gets to the C items using your approach.

What I try to do instead, given the same priority list, is to devote some small quantity of resources to the C items, more to the B items, and the largest amount to the A items, but to do all three simultaneously (that's the key difference). That way, the priorities are still in order, but the C list stays a manageable length.

If grammatical flaws are on your C list, that's entirely appropriate. But if there are enough of them, the overall perception of quality will suffer and customer confidence in the accuracy of your content will fall off.

My two cents.

Dick


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