Here's a way to make the tradeoff between effort and priority evident. The entire team can participate in this interactive exercise which will result in a set of stories estimated for the current sprint, a set of stories that are estimated but didn't make the cut. They can be used to load a Kanban board, agile wall, story map or issue tracker.

1. Interactive Estimation by Priority Technique and presentation by Dennis Britton www.agilevisioning.com

2. Setup your ‘chart’

3. Stage the User Stories along the bottom

4. Have the team get up and estimate story effort Note: The team is only allowed to move the stories up or down to preserve product owner priorities. when they are done placing the stories, have the team do another round where they can move any of them higher or lower than other stories (not left or right), but have them explain why

5. Draw Grid Lines for quantifying relative estimates

6. Add numerics or T-Shirt Sizes accordingly Go from bottom to top asking whether it is 0, effortless, 1 simplest least effort task, 2 twice that, 3 three times that, etc. until all have numbers or the same idea with S,M,L, XL sizes. Allow discussion. This is valuable. someone ought to take notes on the board if possible. Move the same point stories to the same level as their number. Write the effort points on each story

8. Lower right quadrant contains stories that are quick and valuable. Some of the more junior team members could grab these and run with them.

9. Upper left quadrant contains difficult but marginally useful for the sprint. These may not be cost effective to try.