Mike Myles and Karen Smith's article, "Knowledge / Importance Matrix for Wiki Project Coordination", was published in UX Matters on June 7, 2011.
The article centers on the Knowledge / Importance, or K/I Matrix, as a tool to,
- get a clear vision of overall project status at any given point
- know where to best allocate limited resources, and
- be sure you - as a project team member - are working on what you should be at any point.
A K/I Matrix is a two-dimensional graph with Knowledge on the X axis and Importance on the Y axis, where,
- Knowledge is how well a team understands a task, and
- Importance is the relative value of an item to project success.
Project teams collaborate at regular intervals in the development cycle to position work items in the K/I Matrix. In this way the team collectively agrees on relative value, and understanding of each item. This allows for more informed decision making.
Over the last year the K/I Matrix has been successfully incorporated into a number of projects in Autodesk's AEC group. It's proving to be useful in quickly building team consensus around project priorities, and making teams more effective in the process.
Read the article here.
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Simple but powerful. Helps the team to understand and rank tasks that will span multiple cycles. Recommended!
Posted by: William Fitzpatrick | July 19, 2011 at 01:53 PM
UPDATE: Since publishing this article I've had quite a lot of success - working with multiple project teams - using OneNote for creating a K/I Matrix that links to a wiki, user story management application (such as Jira), and document management system (like SharePoint).
Changes in PowerPoint 2010 make generating a usable html output as described in the article quite difficult, when compared to PP2007. OneNote's native sharing functionality makes it an ideal tool for remote collaboration in this process.
Posted by: Mike Myles | July 15, 2011 at 07:22 AM