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
```