COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
Requirement prioritization is one of the key factors of successful project implementation. Requirement prioritization is used to determine the important functionalities or critical requirements of a system that is going to be developed. In other words, requirement prioritization is done to determine which all system functionalities should be included in a particular iteration.
BA prioritizes the requirement and keeps the most critical requirement on top and follow top –down approach. By doing this BA ensures that the most critical requirement is addressed first. It is also important because it helps to ensure that resources and efforts are focused on most critical requirements to achieve maximum value.
Many a times, stakeholders want that all requirement should be addressed in a single release but it is not possible in real time. So, a BA needs to make stakeholder understand cost- benefit and risk of prioritizing the wrong requirements. It is BA responsibility to make various stakeholders coming on an agreement with respect to requirement prioritization.
MoSCoW- is the most common prioritization technique.
M- Must Have- These are mandatory and non-negotiable requirements.
S- Should Have- These are important requirements and not vital, but add significant value.
C- Could Have- These are nice to have requirements and have a small impact if left out.
W- Would Not- These requirements are not priority for the specific iteration but can be developed in later stage.
Ranking- is also commonly used technique where you rank requirements on an ordinal scale, giving each one a different numerical value based on its importance. Mostly, this technique comes in place after applying MoSCoW for example, we have 10 “MUST” requirements so we need to further prioritize the requirement and give them ranking like 1, 2, 3 and so on.
KANO Analysis- KANO analysis is another requirement prioritization technique based on the satisfaction level of the stakeholders/users. This model categorizes requirements into three categories.
· Basic Factor- These are ‘must have’ or basic feature that the product must have in order to meet the minimum requirements of the users or stakeholders. If these basic features are missing from the product users will get dissatisfied right away and may not use the product.
· Performance Factor- These are the requirements beyond basic ones which improve the performance of the product and create or add value to the users. These features can be a differentiator from the already available product in the market.
Excitement Factor- These are not the basic requirement of the product but may act as USP of the product. These requirements can provide competitive advantage, element of surprise or delight for its users.
