Post It Vote

The problem:

: "We initially had a collection of requirements documents, some of which even were "signed off", but 90% of which are now irrelevant. "
: "We have too many "customers", and have to sometimes deal with 10 in a room at once who don't know what they want, but whatever it is, it's different to what the other nine want."

The planning game is great, but only once you have reasonable consensus amongst your customers.

1. Identify the 'gold owner'

Determine which of your many customers makes the decision: "have they delivered?". It's sometimes the most senior person, it's often the most respected technical person. It's often a consensus decision, but you can bet that not all 10+ of those people matter equally.

2. Focus on is the top 10 features of most important to everyone.

Don't spread yourself too thin. Sometimes this means saying "No, we won't do that". More often it means saying "We won't do that yet."

What you need is broad agreement on what the priorities actually are.

One technique is for someone to go around and talk to everyone and try to create consensus, or at least, to be in the position to make an executive decision.

A more democratic technique is to get everyone in a room and hand each person 3 post-it notes, one big, one medium and one small. Tell them to write their most burning feature on the large post it, their next most burning issue on the medium post it and a 3rd issue on the small one.

Then get people to place their post-its on a white board. Everyone stands around and when someone sees the same issue on two post-its, they move them together. What you'll get is a few large clusters and some small clusters and a few isolated notes.

Take down all the post-its, then put them back up in rows, so that the length of each row shows how many people think the issue is important.

After that, I've always found a little more discussion and the group as a whole will agree what the top priorities are. (It's not always the longest row.) Some people won't be happy, but they will understand that their needs and the group's diverge.

Now lock the door and work on the agreed issues for three weeks.

-- BenAveling