Five Requirements Prioritization Methods

Prioritizing requirements is a key to project success. These five methods can help.

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When customer expectations are high and timelines are short you need to make sure your project team delivers the most valuable functionality as early as possible. Prioritization is the only way to deal with competing demands for limited resources.

Stakeholders on a small project often can agree on requirement priorities informally. Large or contentious projects with many stakeholders demand a more structured approach. You need to removes some of the emotion, politics, and guesswork from the process. This article discusses several techniques teams can use for prioritizing requirements and some traps to watch out for.

Two Big Traps

Be sure to watch out for “decibel prioritization,” in which the loudest voice heard gets top priority, and “threat prioritization,” in which stakeholders holding the most political power always get what they demand. These traps can skew the process away from addressing your true business objectives.

In or Out

The simplest method is for a group of stakeholders to work down a list of requirements and decide for each if it’s in or it’s out. Refer to the project’s business…