What is Prioritization of Requirement?

Prioritization of Requirements in Business Analysis

Prioritization is an important step in Business Analysis. It involves the stakeholders, requirements analysis and understand the effect of different factors that may interfere in the requirements order implementation importance, ensuring the maximum value is achieved.

It is the process of deciding which requirements should go first for the development based on several scenarios. In general, we calculate the relative importance of any requirement based on its urgency, amount of risk involved, the difficulty of implementation, a likelihood of its success, stakeholder agreement or policy compliance. Prioritization ensures that the most critical requirements are addressed immediately in case time or budgets run out.

The biggest challenge we face in doing the requirement prioritization is when client ranks all of their requirements as high-value requirements.

In this case, as a Business Analyst, we should put our negotiation cap and make them understand why all requirements cannot be of the same value and also explain to them the process with which we can categorize their requirements in High, medium, and log (When you rank requirements on an ordinal scale, you give each one a different numerical value based on its importance.).

Below are some of the basis explained based on which we can prioritize our requirements:-

1. Risk involved:- we have to select and investigate the requirements that are of highest risk of project failure. Reason behind that is that if the project fails at the beginning itself then there will be very minimal loss of time, resource and budget.
2. Business Value:- This is done on the cost-benefit analysis . The requirement which got the high rank based on CB Analysis will be implemented first.
3. Stakeholder Agreement:- This approach requires the stakeholders to reach a consensus on which requirements are most useful or valuable. Usually this is combined with rest of the requirement prioritization base.
4. Likelihood of success:- In general we use this in case when we want to earn the goodwill of our customers by implementing the requirements which will show the early sign of progress.
5. Difficulty in implementation:- This approach selects requirements that are easiest to implement. It allows the project team to gain familiarity with the implementation process or the tools.
6. Regulatory or Policy Compliance:– This approach prioritizes a requirement that has to be implemented in order to meet regulatory / policy demands imposed on the organization.

Techniques that can be used to Prioritize the Requirements

There are many techniques which are useful and helpful to prioritize the requirements. Some of the techniques are listed below:

MoSCoW 

MoSCoW is an acronym stands for “Must, Should, Could, Won’t.” It’s one of the simplest methods to evaluate the importance of each task. It is also very popular among waterfall-based enterprises. The MoSCoW method helps to rank and classify your product items to get a successful result. 

Must – These features must be satisfied 

Should – These features have high-priority but not critical

Could – These features are desirable, but not necessary

Won’t – These features will not be implemented

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

The method actually describes an entire framework for choosing correct decisions in fields such as business, healthcare, government, and many others. Stakeholders decompose their goal into smaller sub-problems, which can easily be comprehended and analyzed. This method is not suitable for a high number of requirements as the number of requirements determine the number of comparisons that need to be made.

Hundred Dollar Method

This is a simple method where multiple stakeholders need to vote on which is the most important requirement. Stakeholders get a conceptual 100 dollars, which they can distribute among the requirements. Every stakeholder can either choose one requirement which is the most important or high-priority and give all the100 dollars to that one requirement or they can split and distribute the 100 dollars to different requirements accordingly. Finally the requirement which has the higher amount will be considered as the high-priority. This technique should only be used when you have a small group of requirements to prioritize and when you have the same set of requirements to prevent respondents from influencing their results by assigning more dollars to their favorite requirement.

Ranking

This method is useful when you are dealing with a single stakeholder as it can be difficult to align different stakeholder’s perspectives on what the priority of a requirement should be. Considering an average can however, address this problem to some extent.

Bubble Sort Technique

This technique is useful to compare the two requirements and select the high-priority requirement. Take two requirements and compare them with each other. Select the one which has high-priority. Continue the same until the very last requirement is properly sorted. The result is a list of requirements that are ranked as high-priority.

Five Whys

The five whys technique used to analyze the cause and effect relationships underlying a particular problem. In this technique, the analyst asks the stakeholder repeatedly five times or less “why the requirement is necessary” until the importance of the requirements is established. The answers reveal whether the requirement is really necessary or can be cancelled/postponed once the priority is determined.

Challenges of Prioritization

The prioritization of requirements is a strenuous task, that involves some challenges.

Conflict amongst stakeholders:

Typically, the stakeholder might value requirements differently, what’s most vital for one, is completely different from another.

Difficult to outline priority:

For a few stakeholders it is difficult to explain what’s most vital part in a project, where sometimes, all requirements became a high-priority or low-priority are put in place of another important requirement.

Stakeholders that try and influence the result:

It´s attainable that stakeholders might intentionally or unintentionally indicate a priority to influence the result as they expect.

Conclusion

Priorities may vary as the change evolves, old requirements are met, and new requirements arise. So, the Business Analyst should maintain a continuous service of prioritization with the stakeholders on different levels such as 

• Initial stage
• After requirements refined
• Implementation stage