Effort and impact

Adding impact and/or effort on work items is a great way to communicate and share rough estimations and sort work so that the low-hanging fruits (high impact, low effort) get prioritized over things that have less impact and/or require more effort.

Impact and effort on a work item

From the “...” menu on a work item, select Set effort or Set impact, press e (for effort) or i (for impact), or click the existing impact and effort. You can by default choose between Small, Medium, Large, or None in the selector, but you can also customize them.

Custom impact and effort

You want to customize your impact and effort scale, you can do so in the “Impact and Effort” section in space settings:

You can drag them to order them (remember to keep smallest on top) and can choose name color, as well as add up to 9 custom levels.

Prioritizing based on effort and impact

Kitemaker can automatically sort the work items based on impact and effort. From the menu at the top of the status column, select Impact & effort in the Ordering. Kitemaker will use a scoring formula to ensure that at all times low-hanging fruits are on the top and lower impact higher effort items are further down.

The scoring used in prioritization is defined as $\frac{Impact}{Effort}$.

Where Impact is 0.5 for small, 1.0 for medium, 2 for large, and 0.25 if it’s missing. Effort is 1 for small, 2 for medium, 3 for large, and 4 if it’s missing.