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Tug of war in the workplace
Home / Insights / ＿

How to prioritise digital initiatives

Of all the competing priorities on your digital roadmap, which one should you tackle first? Without a clear and transparent process, decisions are often made based on who shouts the loudest or who holds the most seniority. But there is a better way...

Matthew Stobo
Matthew Stobo

25 June 2025

7 minute read

Of all the competing priorities on your digital roadmap, which one should you tackle first?

You’ve got the marketing team demanding a new campaign landing page, the sales team pleading for a CRM integration, and the CEO asking what the plan is for AI. Meanwhile, your budget and development resources are, as always, finite. Sound familiar?

In large or even medium-sized organisations, this constant battle for priority is a daily reality. The problem is that without a clear and transparent process, decisions are often made based on who shouts the loudest, who holds the most seniority, or which department has the deepest pockets.

As a digital agency that’s been operating for over two decades, we’ve seen this scenario before. It’s a reactive approach that leads to scattered effort, frustrated teams, and a digital strategy that feels more like a game of Whac-A-Mole than a coordinated plan.

To move from being reactive to proactive, you need a consistent, transparent, and data-driven way to decide where to apply your efforts. You need a prioritisation framework.

From competing voices to consistency

A prioritisation framework is essentially a tool to help you make decisions. It provides a structured process for evaluating initiatives against a common set of criteria, giving you a consistent way to score and rank what’s most important.

The need for a framework increases with the complexity of your work. If you have constraints on your time or budget, and any lack of clarity on what to deliver next, a framework will help. It transforms the conversation from subjective debate to objective analysis.

There are many different frameworks out there, from the wonderfully simple to the incredibly detailed. Let’s explore a few of the most common ones.

The Effort/Value Matrix

One of the most straightforward ways to start prioritising is the classic four-quadrant Effort/Value matrix. You simply plot each initiative on a grid based on how much value it will deliver versus the effort required to implement it.

This gives you four distinct categories:

  • Quick Wins (Low Effort, High Value): Do these now. They deliver maximum bang for your buck.
  • Big Bets (High Effort, High Value): These are major projects that can have a transformative impact, but require significant investment and planning.
  • Maybes/Fill-ins (Low Effort, Low Value): Tackle these when you have spare capacity, but don't let them distract from more important work.
  • Time Sinks (High Effort, Low Value): Avoid these. They drain resources for little return.

While simple, this matrix provides a powerful visual guideline. However, for more nuanced decision-making, you often need to add a few more layers.

The ICE Scoring Model

ICE is a popular scoring model that introduces an extra dimension to the decision-making process. It’s still relatively simple, making it an excellent starting point for teams that currently have no prioritisation process at all.

Each potential initiative is scored (usually from one to 10) against three criteria:

  • Impact: How much will this initiative positively affect the key metric you’re trying to improve? This could be anything from increasing conversion rates to improving customer satisfaction. What do we get for doing this?
  • Confidence: How certain are you about the predicted impact (and the required effort)? A high confidence score might be backed by user testing, analytics data, or market research. A low confidence score is more of a gut feeling.
  • Ease: How easy is it to implement this? This is essentially the inverse of effort. A high score for ‘Ease’ means low effort.

You then simply add the three scores together (I + C + E) to get a final priority score. The highest-scoring items are your top priorities. A popular variation is the RICE model, which adds ‘Reach’ to the equation (Reach x Impact x Confidence / Effort) to factor in the size of the audience an initiative will affect.

Caveats: The main pitfall of ICE is its subjectivity. To make it work, you need a clearly documented and consistent way of scoring. It can also be difficult to get an accurate measure of ‘Ease’ when a task involves multiple teams with different capacity and skill sets.

Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)

At the more complex end of the spectrum is Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), a key component of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). You wouldn’t typically use WSJF as a standalone tool; it’s designed for organisations that have already adopted a Scaled Agile methodology for managing work.

WSJF provides a formula for prioritisation based on the economics of product development. The core idea is to calculate the Cost of Delay and divide it by the Job Duration.

WSJF = Cost of Delay / Job Duration

Cost of Delay isn't just about lost revenue; it’s a combination of factors including user-business value, time criticality, and risk reduction or opportunity enablement. In simple terms, it helps you quantify the money and value you’re leaving on the table by not doing a project sooner.

Challenges: WSJF is powerful because it forces a conversation around financial impact and the time value of features. However, it’s complex. Calculating the Cost of Delay requires a deep understanding of the business context and isn't something you can do on the back of a napkin.

The custom framework approach

So, what happens when ICE is too simple, but WSJF is a sledgehammer to crack a nut?

This is a situation we encounter frequently. We recently worked with a large, global client to help them define a process for managing their digital portfolio. Their various country and product teams all had ideas and initiatives, and the global digital team needed a way to decide where to apply their efforts first.

We found that the ICE model was just a bit too thin for their needs. It couldn’t accurately reflect their existing business KPIs, and it struggled to capture the ‘Ease’ of a task that might be simple for one team but a major headache for another. At the same time, adopting the full WSJF model was out of the question, as it would require a fundamental change to the way the organisation worked.

The solution was to create a custom framework that blended the simplicity of ICE with the specific factors that mattered to their business.

Through a series of interviews with stakeholders, we built a bespoke scoring model based on five key metrics, including global impact, unlocking future opportunities, and the balance between customer benefit and internal workplace efficiency. This was then implemented in Jira Product Discovery, creating a central, transparent system for generating, validating, assessing, and prioritising all digital initiatives.

Choosing your weapon

There is no single ‘best’ framework. The right choice depends on your organisation's complexity, maturity, and culture.

Framework

How it Works

Pros

Cons

Recommended Use Case

Effort/Value Matrix

Plotting tasks on a 2x2 grid based on their value and effort.

Very simple and visual.

Lacks nuance; ‘value’ can be subjective.

Quick, high-level sorting of tasks or for teams new to prioritisation.

ICE/RICE Model

Scoring initiatives based on Impact, Confidence, and Ease (and sometimes Reach).

Simple to calculate; adds confidence as a key factor.

Can be subjective; may not capture full business context.

Prioritising features or projects where complexity is moderate.

WSJF

Calculating a score based on the Cost of Delay divided by Job Duration.

Based on economic principles; excellent for complex environments.

Very complex to calculate; requires the organisation to use Scaled Agile.

Large-scale enterprises using SAFe to prioritise their entire roadmap.

Custom Framework

Blending elements of established models with business-specific KPIs.

Tailored to your exact needs and context.

Requires initial effort to define and set up.

Organisations with unique needs where standard models fall short.

Clarity and alignment

Moving from a culture where the loudest voice wins to one based on a structured, transparent process doesn’t happen overnight.

But by implementing a prioritisation framework – whether it’s a simple ICE model in a spreadsheet or a custom-built system in Jira – you empower your team to make consistent, data-informed decisions. It provides a clear line of sight on everything that’s happening and, most importantly, why it’s happening.

You replace reactive chaos with proactive clarity, ensuring your digital efforts are always focused on what truly matters to your business.

Of course, in the end nothing beats the insight that comes from being in the trenches. If you’re struggling to get a handle on your digital roadmap and need help in bringing this kind of clarity to your organisation, feel free to reach out to the team at Luminary.


Matthew Stobo
Matthew Stobo

25 June 2025

7 minute read

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