A Prioritization Process

requirements might be put in a requirements database. With either implementation, one of the attributes must be priority. Why should you prioritize requirements? 1. If the project is budget-constrained, prioritization will help you decide which requirements should be implemented and which should be candidates for elimination. 2. If the project is time-constrained, prioritization will help you decide which requirements should be implemented first. Often the product is delivered in phases. At each delivery, the system must have testable functionality. Prioritization helps you choose the functions to implement in each phase. 3. Prioritizing scenarios and identifying benefits, costs and dependencies will help create the system architecture. 4. Prioritization improves customer satisfaction by increasing the likelihood that the customer’s most important requirements are implemented and delivered first— customers like to see their funds being used effectively and wisely. 5. Prioritization will allow you to spend more time and effort reducing risks associated with hard technical problems and key performance parameters. 6. You might want to assign your best people to the highest priority requirements. 7. Prioritizing requirements will help you manage requirements creep. If requirements being added are high priority, then they might displace some lowpriority requirements. 8. Prioritizing requirements will reduce discussion time at meetings and reviews. 9. Prioritizing requirements will help identify the highpriority requirements for which you should create Technical Performance Measures (TPMs) (Oakes, Botta, and Bahill, 2006).