Prioritize Competing Requirements

  Making the Tough Decision

Introduction
  Jim Haggard - from the business software industry

Workshop Overview


Criteria for prioritizing requirements
 Strategy - growth, expansion, hold, discontinue ?
 Customers - Marquee, Recurring revenue, User council, bugs
 Sales - pilot program, close a big deal
 Competition - Parity or Advantage
 Market - New markets, penetrate existing markets
 Technologies -
 
   Discussion: Feature/Function  &  Platform Design
     May be expensive to develop on an older platform, vs the new platform...
     Decisions may have been made externally - ie acquisitions or market pressures
 
 Basic Scenarios
  Competing priorities of apparently equal strategic importance
  Mix of priorities
   Very important marquee customers
   Needed for new sales
   Required to stay in a competitive leadership position
  All are fairly large features
   Will take time
   With current resources they can be done one at a time
   Funding
  Deemed equally important by the stakeholders

  Discussion:  Do people use metrics and a defined process or standardized tests for evaluating requirements and feature requests.  Product release example: if you miss this train, there is another one coming so get it into the next one.  Microsoft's product pipeline system.  How do you know if your product is "ahead of it's time" or "before it's time".


Be as objective as possible
Identify & Resolve conflicts
Make the tough decisions

Criteria Matrix
  Size, Effort (time), Cost
  Risk, Quality,

Open Discussion

Conclusion