Setting Priorities With The 2x2

You have ten great ideas every week. But do you find it difficult to set priorities in your business? Does every initiative seem like it's high priority?

In this week's video, I share the Impact/Effort Matrix or also known as the "2x2." This powerful framework groups company initiatives by impact and effort needed. Together with your team, you can identify the quick wins, major projects, thankless tasks, and everything else.

Transcription

Hi. This is Xavier Chang, Principal of XC Consulting. Today we're back with another episode of Xcel with Xavier and today we're talking about setting priorities. In your business you probably have a lot of initiatives and priorities and things you want to get done but there is limited resources in terms of time, money, and your staff.

So it's very important to prioritize what you want to do first. So the framework that I'm going to introduce to you today actually, helps you to think through what is actually highest priority. This impact/effort matrix or also known as the 2x2 is a great tool to really understand what is actually a priority.

So I'm going to go through some of the key points of this matrix. On the y-axis, you have impact and it goes from low impact to high impact. On the x-axis you have low effort to high effort. When you do the cross between impact and effort, we actually, you know, create these quadrants, these four quadrants.

Something that is high impact and low effort, this would be a quick win. Continuing on clockwise, something that will be high effort and high impact is a major project. So something that's going to take a very long time, but it's going to deliver great benefits. Then you have your thankless tasks. So that is high effort and low impact. And then finally you've got your fill ins which is low effort and low impact as well.

Off to the right here, you have your, project list or initiatives things that you're thinking about, typically in this exercise you put all of your initiatives into that project list and as a team you start figuring out where does this lie on the matrix? What cross section? Is it a quick way? Is it a major project? Is it a thankless task or is it something that needs to be filled in?

Best practice is to define the demarcation between low and high. For impact that could be a dollar amount. So you want to set a demarcation between a low impact and a high impact. What is that dollar amount? And on something around effort that could be time. So how long, how much effort would that take? And how long would that take? This just makes it a little bit more concrete instead of just going on feeling and it's helpful for the team if you're doing this as a team exercise.

Let me walk you through an example. This is my two-by-two example for a new client and I filled it in with some of the things that I do for my clients. What you'll notice on the X and the y-axis is that I've defined for effort, what is a low effort versus a high effort? So for low, it's anything that's less than or equal to four weeks and something that is high effort is greater than four weeks. On the impact as well, we've got low impact, that's something that's delivering less than $10,000 and high impact is something that's delivering greater than or equal to $10,000.

I'll go through these fairly quickly. So, a quick win high impact, low effort. The first one would be to identify department responsibilities: learning about the departments, speaking to department managers and understanding, really what they do at the core of their department and for of their jobs. Next to that is creating a company org chart.

Once again, these are things that are taking a long time so greater than four weeks, but the impact is greater than or equal to $10,000. Documenting department procedures, implementing a new digital productivity tool, conducting team training.

We'll keep going. Thankless tasks: Providing periodic updates to stakeholders is important, but it might not be the most important thing. And this is high effort because this is happening on an ongoing basis throughout the engagement, throughout the project.

Lastly, we've got our fill-ins, which is, conducting the kick off call with the team. It's pretty low impact and it's low effort. It's a one-time thing. So that is the two by two or the impact/effort matrix.

And hopefully you thought this was helpful and this is something that you can implement in your business today to help start planning and some of the initiatives that you may have. If you thought this was helpful, please like this video, and subscribe to my channel, and I look forward to posting the next video and getting your engagement.

Thanks so much and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for watching another episode of Xcel with Xavier. I've got new episodes coming out every Thursday morning. Please don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel to receive notifications of new content. Thanks again. I hope to see you again next time.