Optimising priorities is integral to sustained organisational efficiency.
After all, without it, organisations risk inefficiency. And this will have significantly negative internal and external ramifications.
Imagine for a moment that you wish to initiate a marketing campaign, one that yields notable short-term gains and a prolonged long-term ROI to bolster your influence within a specific demographic.
How can you accurately score success? You need a framework.
Now, let’s consider a different scenario.
You’re planning a product launch during one of the forthcoming 2025 quarters. You believe that this product has the potential to transform, or at least, bolster your organisation’s fortunes. You, obviously, want to ensure maximum influence on launch and sustained longevity.
This takes astute planning, organisation, and execution. It takes a plan. A model. And a prioritisation framework.
Keep reading below to learn everything that you need to know about the prioritisation framework, including one of the most successful models, ICE framework, including a description of the framework, its advantages, and disadvantages and how to apply it to L&D. 🙌
Why Use a Prioritisation Framework?
Simple. Operations have a huge scope. They’re interconnected, interweaving, whilst being disparate–and necessary.
Organisations that focus on growth and success need to understand what they should be doing to achieve their aims. They need to hone their strategies, actions, and priorities according to the short- and long-term goals of the organisation.
If not well thought out, this can pose problems to the organisation for several reasons. 🤔 These include:
- Organisational ambitions, for example, an evolution of operational processes, are difficult to qualify and accurately measure in important ways, such as customer value or increased revenue.
- Even the most learned L&D professional or experienced senior manager can’t predict which ideas will be a success and which will flounder.
- Too many employers make decisions based on opinions, not facts. Or, they see something has worked for one organisation, let’s say, optimising incoming enquiries, and assume that the same process will work for them. The result, they go all-in without fully thinking about where the chips will fall.
Prioritising high-impact projects is paramount!
This is best explained as opportunity cost or the idea that designated how to spend valuable resources, like time and money, is paramount to a successful growth strategy and sustained success.
This data is leveraged by astute business owners, stakeholders, consultants, marketers, and product teams to make decisions and prioritise actions, thereby creating a prioritisation framework.
For an organisation to be successful, it must assign resources astutely.
Successful growth teams employ frameworks to prioritise their workloads more accurately. This allows for a hodgepodge of ideas to be whittled down into a clear, easy-to-implement strategy.
What Is the ICE Framework?
The ICE Framework is one of several prioritisation strategies available to organisations to evaluate the potential success of a project or its features. 📈
ICE is designed to provide a structured process for project managers to evaluate and prioritise the actions needed to meet specific short- and long-term goals. Its insights and agility make it easy for departmental organisations to implement high-impact changes with a greater level of success.
So, let’s say that you’re part of the senior R&D team at Apple.
You’re tasked with innovating the next-generation iPhone. Your goal is to create a product consumers will love. And you have a few ideas. 📲
You may want to champion the Apple A19 chip for faster processing speed and better app performance. Maybe iterate on the current design, making the device sleeker. Improve the battery life so consumers aren’t forever charging their phones. Perhaps, create an iPhone with a 3D holographic display–though this may seem a bridge too far!
How do you evaluate and prioritise which features are most integral to product success? Easy. Use the ICE Framework.
What ICE Stands For
Understanding what ICE stands for is hardly rocket science. In fact, when you really think about it, the definition is self-explanatory.
The robust framework draws upon three distinct values:
- Impact – how much any new concept, process, or innovation will improve existing actions
- Confidence – how certain you and your team are that evolving, let’s say an internal AI-focused L&D platform will benefit your organisation.
- Ease – the amount of effort needed to complete the project
What Is the ICE Scoring Framework?
Each element is analysed and then scored using a numerical value.
The total ICE score is calculated by combining the individual scores of the three distinct values. Keep scoring simple, say 1-3 representing a low score, 4-7 representing an average score and 8-10 representing a high score. ☺️
The three scores are then multiplied together to get a cumulative total. (An example of this is below.)
So, let’s say you want to be part of a new era of L&D by leveraging Thirst’s AI-driven L&D platform. But first, you want to see if the technology matches your needs and aspirations.
By using the ICE framework and collating a cumulative score, you’ll get a solid indication of whether the investment is worth it. The best part? It’s a simple, streamlined way of obtaining data-driven insight into why, for example, evolving your organisation’s L&D with Thirst is a great idea! 🔥
Sounds good, right? Well, leading Blue-Chip businesses and global organisations agree with you. From Airbnb to Dropbox, brands with expansive global footprints rely on ICE scoring to improve their website functionality and user engagement.
Advantages and Disadvantages of the ICE Framework
As you can imagine, the ICE Framework has a list of advantages and disadvantages. Understanding these is paramount to deciding if the scoring framework is best suited to your purpose.
Keep reading below to learn the primary advantages and disadvantages of the ICE Framework.
Advantages of the ICE Framework
Fast and efficient: the straightforward scoring system makes it quick and easy for people to compare varying elements without having to review complex amounts of data without getting bogged down in complex analysis.
Easy to understand: the three distinct categories (Impact, Confidence and Ease) are easy to define and simple for everyone in the organisation to understand.
Encourages rapid decision-making: ICE is perfect for circumstances that require rapid decision-making, for example, the initial stages of product development or when organisations need to take immediate action to rectify inefficiency. 👍🏻
Flexible and adaptable: the simplicity of the framework means that it can be customised to fit different contexts and project goals, whilst simultaneously factoring in varying elements.
Evaluation of key factors: more complex scoring frameworks can be convoluted, consider too many factors, and be unfocused on what really matters. ICE only considers what’s important – and impactful.
Disadvantages of the ICE Framework
Scoring subjectivity: the way different people score each category is based on their own personal biases. This can result in inconsistencies between different people on the same team evaluating the same thing.
Lack of nuance: ICE may be simplified, but it doesn’t consider complexities or variables. And this means that crucial factors, beyond basic, core elements, can be overlooked. ❌
Ease and convenience over complexity and value: some people may prioritise actionable, immediate scoring over insightful and pertinent ones. This may lead to unsatisfactory or unhelpful insights.
Not ideal for long-term planning: more sophisticated frameworks may prove to be beneficial for in-depth long-term strategies.
Potential for crossovers: ease and confidence are interlinked. Confidence comes from ease of use. People might score these two categories the same. Therefore, any insights gleaned may not be as insightful as expected.
How to Apply the ICE Framework to L&D
ICE is one of the best frameworks for managing organisational information, and this includes L&D.
The framework gives everyone within the organisation a voice, and a chance to highlight what they feel to be important – in a concise and easy-to-interpret way.
This is vital. Why? It provides a detailed overview of where organisations need to focus on improving their efficiency.
Incorporate ICE into your L&D and you’ll be able to draw upon a wealth of first-hand information to identify areas which would benefit from significant L&D and, consequently, optimise performance and ROI. ⭐
The best part?
ICE’s flexibility means that it can be easily applied to the L&D in every area of the organisation.
You might choose to create a specialised leadership programme for mid-level managers and score its effectiveness accordingly:
Impact: 8–new processes could reap clear rewards, bolstering enquiries and sales and increasing customer satisfaction.
Confidence: 6–having completed the leadership programme, middle managers may feel better equipped to communicate with prospects and customers. However, remember you may believe that further L&D training is required to optimise skillsets.
Ease: 3–getting organisation-wide buy-in might prove a challenge, especially given the responsibilities middle managers have. You may also feel that there’s a better way of delivering L&D content to maximise retention.
ICE Score = 240.
This simple, straightforward scoring method can be a great asset to L&D when designing or iterating course content and what to focus L&D resources on.
Best of all?
ICE doesn’t take too much time, so if you simply want to gain an understanding of which L&D initiatives are working and which aren’t, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better, more efficient scoring framework. 💯
Final Thoughts
In our ever-evolving professional environments, L&D must solve problems rapidly. Especially if these problems have a knock-on effect that hinders growth.
However, the question then arises once we’ve solved such problems, how do we then prioritise which solutions are the most effective and should be shared as part of any ongoing L&D?
The answer is the ICE Framework.
The ICE Framework gives you a strong baseline to understand the likelihood any L&D initiatives will have of reaching the desired outcome (the impact). The confidence actions taken will drive performance improvement (the confidence, surprise, surprise!) and the difficulty that objectives will be met with L&D (or ease).
Better still, the flexibility of the framework means that it can be applied to every aspect of your L&D, including process and content iterations!
Despite its lack of nuance and complexity, ICE can offer a slick way to streamline decisions!
Don’t forget, when you’re trying to reach a consensus, sometimes ruling things out is just as helpful as figuring out which item is the cream of the crop.
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Thirst is an AI-powered learning platform that helps L&D teams of all sizes boost learner engagement and create experiences tailored to today’s learners.
Take a guided tour today and see Thirst in action.
For more e-learning insights, resources and information, discover the Thirst blog.
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