The Art (or Science?) of Prioritizing Requirements Right

/in /by
  1. 1. Get all involved in a room to discuss each participant’s reasons for priorities so that they are all heard.
  2. Don’t try to prioritize all requirements in one sitting.
  3. Try to get numerical priority (especially for high priority items) instead of general high, medium, low categories.
  4. Buy A Feature (Assign a value to each feature and give stakeholders a fixed amount of fake cash that they may use to “purchase” the features they most desire.)
  5. First In, First Out
  6. Prioritize by considering Cost of Delay
  7. Company Drivers/Department Drivers – Know the priority of each driver and based on that, prioritize the requirements.
  8. MoSCoW approach – must have, should have, could have, won’t have
  9. Determine if multiple requirements are addressing the same problem to reduce potential duplicates or conflicting requirements first.
  10. Agree on a Ranking/Rating System and define the rank values (High, Medium, Low; What do they mean?)
  11. Refer to the project objectives to identify high priority requirements. If a requirement does not help achieve an objective determine whether the requirement is out of scope or an objective was missed.
  12. Determine high priority requirements by asking “If you could only have x items in your solution which would you choose?”
  13. Priority Pyramid – Force the group to determine the most important feature or requirement for the top box. Next select the next 2 most important items for row 2.
    Continue expanding by one feature for each row until the pyramid is built. The top 2 or 3 rows would be the highest priority.
  14. Realize that priorities will change over time, even on short projects. Constantly revisit
    priorities to ensure validity