As the manager of an internal User Experience team you need to prioritise the projects to which you assign your staff. If you give a bit of help to all projects you’ll spread your staff too thinly - and the business-critical projects will suffer.
Prioritise your projects into one of three levels, Gold, Silver, or Bronze.
How to identify Gold projects
- Are mission critical to the business - they will make a big difference to your company’s on-going success
- Work on tasks or functionality needed by lots of users
- Fix big problems that really hit the bottom line: usability headaches that hit lots of users lots of times
- Stakes are high - improving success rates, satisfaction, or efficiency will bring in big money or mitigate severe risks.
Examples of Gold projects: Developing personas, prioritising functionality on the home page, product search and comparison tools, removing barriers in the check-out process.
Put you best staff on Gold projects. If you’re understaffed and quality and timelines are critical, get outside top-notch contracters in.
Next we’ll look at Silver projects - the important but not critical ones that make up the majority of your projects.