What is the ice scoring model?
The ICE Scoring Model is a reasonably rapid technique to assign a numerical score to specific possible initiatives or ideas to prioritize them based on their relative value.
ICE is an acronym that stands for Impact, Confidence, and Ease, and these are the three measures used to evaluate projects for project managers.
The History of the Ice Scoring Model
It is widely believed that Sean Ellis, the CEO of GrowthHackers, is the inventor of the ICE Scoring Model. Ellis is an angel investor with a wealth of experience in assisting firms in their growth. He credits a large portion of his success to divergent thinking, followed by swift prioritizing.
The ICE Scoring Model provided him with a method of accomplishing this; it allowed him to sift swiftly through a vast list of ideas while maintaining accuracy.
The components of The Ice Scoring Model
Impact
The potential for a project to contribute to achieving the primary business goal is referred to as its impact.
For example, if your goal is to increase the number of people who use your app, anything that could increase sign-ups would positively impact your score.
Confidence
Confidence helps to moderate the Impact score a little by prompting you to examine how confident you are that you will realize this impact in the first place.
Ease
To some extent, ease of completion is self-explanatory: how difficult is it to complete the project or test? There are no fixed parameters in this exercise; all of the scoring is done about the other ideas on the table.
The Importance of The Ice Scoring Model
Agile settings are fast-paced, and choices must be taken rapidly during short development cycles to keep the project on track. Decision-makers must analyze as much information as possible without becoming overwhelmed by the amount of data.
The ICE Scoring Model does an excellent job of providing teams with a picture of the most valuable actions, which is a difficult balance to strike in the first place.
The Benefits of The Ice Scoring Model
ICE is a quick and straightforward method
You would expect the model to be oversimplified because it is so specific to construct. In reality, though, when all three criteria’s values are added together, each measure has an equally significant impact on the outcome.
It is important to note that a significant factor magnifies the difference between a seven and an 8 for confidence
.
Ice helps you to understand where you are
The final ICE scores will provide a more accurate picture of how your projects stand about one another.
This, of course, is predicated on the values being accurate, which is where the ICE Scoring Model runs into some difficulties.
Disadvantages of the ICE scoring Model
ICE Scoring’s most excellent selling features are speed and simplicity, which can assist product teams in narrowing down their options.
Its strength is also one of its weaknesses: because it only evaluates an item’s influence on a single objective, it falls short of other scoring models’ capabilities in an organization with many concurrent goals.
Regardless of the lack of nuance and complexity, ICE Scoring can be a valuable technique to simplify things and provide decision-makers with some relative comparison points. When it comes to reaching a consensus, ruling things out can be just as beneficial as determining which item is the best.
ICE is a quick and straightforward method of determining where to direct your efforts, but it suffers from the fact that it is highly subjective.
As you might guess, you should give the project, idea, or feature with the greatest ICE score the top priority, followed by the rest. Another significant disadvantage of the ICE model is the subjective nature of the assessment.
Different people could give dramatically different ratings to the same project or feature based on Impact, Confidence, and Ease factors.
Example For The Ice Scoring Model
In this section, we’ve produced an example based on three hypothetical projects that have been assessed using the ICE approach, which you can see below.
Project 1 is expected to have a significant influence, and we are confident about this. However, it is complex and lengthy, and it has a low ease of use rating, which significantly lowers the overall ICE score.
Project 2 has the potential to have a moderate influence, but we are not convinced that we will be able to do this. It also receives a low rating while having high ease of use value.
Even though Project 3 has a low impact, it has high confidence and eases scores, which means it can be performed quickly and is guaranteed to provide a great outcome.
Consequently, according to the ICE model, we should prioritize Project 3. Then, once it has been completed, we should return to the table to determine the next project.
Because of the enticing influence of project 1, you might have enticed us to pursue it without a scoring technique such as ICE. However, after combining the results of all three initiatives, we can determine that you should complete other actions first.
How To Use The Ice Scoring Model
Determine the extent to which this effort or essential feature will have an impact. Will this new feature positively influence the user, and if so, how much?
1 – Minimal influence
2–5 – Minimal repercussions
6–8 – Impact that you can measure
8–10 – Significant influence
While assessing the impact, consider whether this effort or feature will assist you in achieving your overall strategic goal.
Confidence: Your confidence score can be backed up by analytics from similar previous projects, a gut sense, or a combination of the two. How sure are you that you will warmly receive this feature or effort? How dangerous is it to put time and money into this project?
1 – Extremely poor self-assurance
2 – 5 – Minimal confidence
6 – 8 – Measurable confidence
Finely, You may multiply to get the total once you’ve created a number from 1 to 10 for each category.
Conclusion
When it comes to agile prioritizing tools, the ICE Scoring Model stands out because it evaluates projects, concepts, and features using three sets of measurements: impact, confidence, and ease.
In contrast to weighted scoring methods, the ICE scoring system employs only these parameters and assigns each a relative value between 1 and 10. (1 being low, ten being high). You have to multiply all three points together to get your ICE result.
