Alan Pinstein's dashboard

How do you go about prioritizing all the items in the backlog? There could potentially be 100's of stories.

In previous product management processes, we had a handful of fields for each story that allowed us to persist "business priority information" about ideas. The fields were:

Business Value: 1-3 (1=most revenue potential, 3=least)
Strategic Fit: 1-3 (1=most aligned with core strategy)
Time To Implement: 1-4 (1=quick fix, 2=4-8 hrs, 3=multi-day, 4=multi-week)

At a periodic meeting we'd "score" all new stories. Simple weighting formulas could then produce a list of reasonably ordered items, which we'd then hand-pick for iterations.

I don't see how to do anything like this in Pivotal. Particularly disappointing is no custom fields, so even if we "score" an item, it's tough to cleanly persist the score for later recall.

I am worried as we use the tool more it'll be painful to have to keep sifting through 100's of backlog entries without this information handy.

How are others dealing with this?

I've just started using Pivotal. In previous workflow management tools, we used the concept of a "Quick Fix" for something that would take < 1 hour to implement.

Naturally, it seemed that we should choose the "lowest" point score to estimate such stories. The lowest point score is ZERO, so we used that on a bunch of stories.

However, it seems that Pivotal really treats this as ZERO, in that if you have 10-point velocity it will schedule arbitrary numbers of zero-point stories into the current iteration.

Do I have this right? If so, what's the point, since a zero-point story essentially opts you out of the capacity planning part of Pivotal.

Please advise!