When customer expectations are high, and timelines are short.
When you need to make sure the product delivers the most critical or valuable functionality as early as possible.
- It is a way to deal with competing demands for limited resources.
- It is a critical strategy for agile or other projects that develop products through a series of fixed-schedule timeboxes.
- On every project, a project manager must balance the desired project scope against the constraints of schedule, budget, staff, and quality goals.
- To drop, or to defer to a later release, low-priority requirements when new, more essential requirements are accepted or when other project conditions change.
Pragmatics
Successful prioritization requires an understanding of six issues:
- The needs of the customers
- The relative importance of requirements to the customers
- The timing at which capabilities need to be delivered
- Requirements that serve as predecessors for other requirements and other relationships among requirements
- Which requirements must be implemented as a group
- The cost to satisfy each requirement
Stakeholders may resists…
To encourage stakeholders to acknowledge that some requirements have lower priority, the analyst can ask questions such as the following:
- Is there some other way to satisfy the need that this requirement addresses?
- What would the consequences be of omitting or deferring this requirement?
- What effect would it have on the project’s business objectives if this requirement was not implemented for several months?
- Why might customers be unhappy if this requirement was deferred to a later release?
- Is having this feature worth delaying the release of all of the other features with this same priority?
Prioritization Techniques
- In or Out
- Three-Level Scale
- Sometimes you may want to iteratively prioritize…
- MoSCoW
- Cost-Value Approach