Guide to easy and effective requirements prioritization
Step 1: Understand the Purpose & Strategy for Prioritization
- What will you do with the prioritized items?
- Prioritize to eliminate items, ensure alignment to objectives, plan scheduling, manage scope creep, etc
- Identify items to prioritize
Step 2: List the Customer Needs
- Select what factors the stakeholders feel are important in prioritizing the requirements
- List the factors that drive the characteristics, scope and functionality of the software product
- List the business benefits or objectives (cost savings, revenue impact, ease of use, utility, etc)
- Determine the customer importance of each
Step 3: List the Requirements
- List the Requirements, either individually, or by cluster (Activity, Function, etc)
- Place as the columns
- Use labels and numbers if cross-reference is helpful
- If more than 20-30, separate and iterate
Step 4: Facilitate the Rating of the Need / Requirements Interrelationships
- Potentially laborious task must be well facilitated
- There are two options: 1) Pre-session survey; 2) In-session voting
- Use chosen numerically assigned scales
- Key Success Factors for need rating
- Set-up – Get the right needs & requirements chosen (purpose-based)
- Involvement – Get the right stakeholders involved
- Facilitation – Skill as a facilitator
- Tools – Use the right methods and tools for voting
- Once completed, calculate the weighted importance rating for each column
Step 5: Determine Technical / Development Factors
- Usually this is a separate session: Project Team and Technical SMEs
- Estimate the resource and cost requirements
- Typical factors are level of effort (or resource requirements), technical difficulty, and cost
Step 6: Determine the Priority Rating
- Facilitate the priority rating for each column (requirement) based on the Importance Rating, and Technical / Development factors
- Record earlier decisions made on ratings and scores allow for easier consensus and agreement, and more accurate and effective decisions based on agreed criteria and factors
- Remember to reference, walkthrough, and review the requirements and specifications
- Techniques: blind voting, statistical calculations, mapping, group discussions, group decision-making, 4 quadrant graph, or executive decision
- Update the requirements document with the rating scores
- As necessary, continue to determine the decisions on the requirement, the schedule and the responsibility
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