Techniques For Prioritising Requirements

Requirements prioritization is one of the key tasks that business analysts should assist stakeholders to complete. Priorities serve as a guide for determining which requirements should be fulfilled first and how scarce resources should be allocated.

The prioritisation exercise should be done with key stakeholders who have the authority to make decisions on eliminating or including business requirements based on their relevance.

There are numerous prioritisation techniques that can be used to ease the process of requirements prioritisation. They are as follows:

1. Top 10 Requirements

This technique requires each participant to identify their top 10 requirements from a group of requirements. It involves a lengthy process of discussions and can be time-consuming.

2. Needs-Based Analysis

The gist of this technique is to distinguish between what people actually need and what they want. Requirements assessed based on what the business needs can give insight into how priorities should be assigned.

3. Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing can be used by virtually anyone to enlist feedback from a very large group of people. Most of these people may not have a deep background knowledge of the problem, however, so the method works best when used for general and easy-to-understand problems. It is particularly suited to products that have a wide user base.

4. Dot Voting

Dot voting is a lot like the hundred-dollar method. Each stakeholder gets a small number of “dots” that he or she can use for voting on which feature should have the highest priority. The requirement or feature with the highest number of dots will have the highest priority.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net