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RICE for ideas

Owned by Attila Bordás
Last updated: Mar 04, 2020
3 min read

RICE is Intercom’s internal scoring system for prioritizing ideas. Based on theri article, “A good prioritization framework can help you consider each factor about a project idea with clear-eyed discipline and combine those factors in a rigorous, consistent way.”

RICE is an acronym for the used four factors to evaluate ideas: reach, impact, confidence and effort.

  • “Reach: how many people will this impact? (Estimate within a defined time period.)”

  • “Impact: how much will this impact each person? (Massive = 3x, High = 2x, Medium = 1x, Low = 0.5x, Minimal = 0.25x.)”

  • “Confidence: how confident are you in your estimates? (High = 100%, Medium = 80%, Low = 50%.)”

  • “Effort: how many “person-months” will this take? (Use whole numbers and minimum of half a month – don’t get into the weeds of estimation.)”

After you defined these factors and their values/scale, to calculate the RICE score, you need to use the following formula:

 

The result score will give your the “total impact per time worked” and it can help you increase efficiency and to decide which idea to implement.

RICE in Jira with Issue Score

You can easily implement RICE scoring with Issue Score.

  1. Create the “Reach”, “Imapct”, “Confidence” (and optinally “Effort”) custom fields as number field or Key-Value fields (if you defined a discrete scale).

  2. Create your RICE Issue Score field and configure the formula.

  3. Apply these field to your project where you want to use the RICE scoring.

Depending on your project and context, you can define an “Effort” field, or use the given Jira fields, like Story Points, Estimate, etc.

You can also arbitrarily define ranges for results if you are using discrete values to visually differentiate between scores on your backlog.

Depending on how you want to use RICE and what you want to prioritize, add you RICE Issue Score field to your Screens and/or Card layout in your project configuration.

You can create a “Project Ideas” Jira project with “Idea” Issue type to achieve the original concept and help you consider each factor about a project idea.

That’s it! Now you can sort your ideas based on the calculated RICE score with drag and drop, or with a custom ordering JQL in Jira.

If you enjoyed this article, try out Issue Score now!