Requirements are volatile in nature. They keep changing based on the business needs and the new requirements keep on coming.
Suppose, you are doing business analysis for a Corporate Banking client, and you received a few requirements in this oder:
- Implement a new feature to send an automatic reminder email to the customer to approve pending authorization requests every day.
- Fix a production issue where the users are not able to generate reports.
- Enhance report generation feature to allow users to generate reports in Excel format in addition to CSV and PDF.
- Implement a regulatory compliance to restrict access to mobile apps to those users only who registered their devices with the bank. This must be implemented within a month.
As a Business Analyst, you would have to analyze each requirement and make it ready for development.
Would you just follow first in fist out method to analyze and scope requirements into the next software release? OR Does it make sense to first prioritize these requirements with business stakeholders so that the most important requirements would get implemented first?
Why is it important to prioritize requirements? #
Adding value to the business is a key consideration for a Business Analyst.
It will not add any value or address business need if the requirements are implemented in the order they are requested.
Hence, it is very important to prioritize requirements to ensure that the most important and critical business requirements are addressed first and followed by the other non critical and less important requirements.
The purpose of prioritization is to rank requirements in the order of their relative importance to business and stakeholders.
Prioritization of requirements will –
- Reduce development costs
- Shorten the project duration
- Ensure that the most important requirements are taken care of
- Manage project better
- Help in trade-offs
On what basis the requirements should be prioritized? #
Requirements should be prioritized using several different criteria, such as:
- Business Value or Benefit
- Penalty
- Cost
- Business or Technical Risk
- Relationship to Other Requirements (Dependencies)
- Time Sensitivity or Urgency
- Stability
- Regulatory or Policy Compliance
What are the challenges in prioritizing requirements? #
- Non negotiable demands from stakeholders i.e. trying to consider all requirements as high priority.
- Unrealistic trade-offs i.e. the implementation team intentionally or unintentionally overestimates a requirement to influence prioritization.
Requirement Prioritization Techniques #
One of the following technique can be used to prioritize requirements.
- Grouping
- Group the requirements into High, Medium or Low Categories
- Group the requirements into the Categories such as - Must, Should, Could, Won’t (popularly known as MoSCoW technique)
- Ranking - rank requirements from least to most important e.g. ranking in product backlog
- Time Boxing/Budgeting - prioritize based on the allocation of a fixed resource (either fixed time window or fixed budget) and include only those requirements that are fit within the allocated resource.
- Negotiation
- Decision Analysis
