Impediment-Prioritization

# Impediment Prioritization Skill

A domain-agnostic skill for ranking impediments and their countermeasures. Works with any `{impediment, countermeasure}` list — GHQR findings, audit results, retro action items, risk registers, architecture review gaps, etc.

When to Activate

Activate when the user:

- Asks to prioritize, rank, sequence, or triage impediments, gaps, risks, findings, or remediation items

- Provides a list of impediments with proposed countermeasures (or asks you to propose countermeasures for a list of problems)

- Asks "what should we fix first" on any improvement / remediation backlog

- Mentions value-stream prioritization, A3 countermeasures, ROI-vs-effort, or lean impediment ranking

Inputs

Accepted input: a list of `{impediment, countermeasure}` pairs. Sources include (non-exhaustive):

| Source | Maps to Impediment | Maps to Countermeasure |

|--------|---------------------|-------------------------|

| GHQR / health-check findings | Finding or gap (Status ≠ Expected) | Recommendation / expected value |

| Audit results | Non-conformance | Remediation action |

| Retrospective | "What went wrong" item | Agreed improvement |

| Risk register | Risk | Mitigation |

| Architecture review | Gap vs. target state | Proposed change |

| User free-form list | Problem statement | Proposed fix |

**Rules:**

- One countermeasure per impediment. If the input suggests multiple remediation paths, select the primary one and note alternatives in the rationale — do not emit multiple rows for the same impediment.

- Collapse duplicates before scoring.

- If a source link / citation is available, attach it to the countermeasure.

- If a confidence level is available on the source, surface it as an optional `Confidence` column.

Scoring Rubric (1–10 scales)

Score each impediment's countermeasure against all four criteria. See [references/scoring-rubric.md](./references/scoring-rubric.md) for anchoring examples at the 1 / 5 / 10 levels across multiple domains (platform engineering, security, SRE, application development, governance).

| Criterion | Scale | Definition |

|-----------|-------|------------|

| **Return on Investment (ROI)** | 1 = low, 10 = high | Efficiency gain delivered by the countermeasure to this step AND to the overall value stream. Not purely financial — weight throughput, cycle-time reduction, defect removal, user / developer experience, and compliance lift. |

| **Cost to Implement** | 1 = inexpensive, 10 = very expensive | Human capital (salary + time of people needed) plus any purchases, licenses, or infrastructure required to implement the countermeasure. |

| **Ease of Deployment** | 1 = extremely hard, 10 = very easy | Remediation effort required to actually deploy the countermeasure end-to-end. Reflects technical complexity, change-management burden, and rollback risk. |

| **Risk Factor** | 1 = low risk, 10 = very high risk | Risk weighted on impact to the overall value stream if the countermeasure goes wrong, stalls, or is deferred. |

Every score must be accompanied by a one-line rationale. When a score is an estimate rather than drawn from explicit data, mark the rationale with `(estimated)`.

Formula

Priority = ((ROI * (10 / Cost)) + (Ease * (10 / Risk))) / 2

- Theoretical range: **1 → 100**. Practical range on typical backlogs: ~1 → 100.

- The scale minimum of `1` guarantees Cost and Risk are never zero (no divide-by-zero).

- Higher Priority = do first.

- Boundary checks:

- ROI=10, Cost=1, Ease=10, Risk=1 → `((10*10)+(10*10))/2 = 100`

- ROI=1, Cost=10, Ease=1, Risk=10 → `((1*1)+(1*1))/2 = 1`

Use the formula verbatim. Do not reweight, normalize, or substitute.

Method (agent procedure)

1. **Ingest** the impediment list. Confirm 1:1 impediment-to-countermeasure mapping; collapse duplicates.

2. **Confirm the countermeasure** for each impediment. Prefer documented best practice for the domain. Cite a public / authoritative link when one is available.

3. **Score** all four crite