I have discussed the use of scatter charts with a colleague of mine during backlog prioritization. I am now attempting to automate this process in Microsoft Excel.

The problem with backlog prioritization is that often only the business priority is considered. By combining the complexity and risk of the task we can see that objectives that are both easy to do and has a large impact on the business should be prioritized.

The idea was to combine the clients business priority with our measure of perceived risk and priority. This gave us a scatter matrix graph. Note that both values was entered in percentage values where 100 is the high number.

Use together with Rob Bovey’s Chart Labeler at http://appspro.com/Utilities/ChartLabeler.htm

Read the full details on my blog at http://blog.lekman.com/2011/02/boston-charts-and-backlog.html