Prioritizing projects and ensuring alignment to the company’s goals and objectives is a continuous effort for organizations. In order to deliver maximum value, project leaders can help prioritize projects. Here are six potential approaches to prioritizing projects.
- Scoring:?Scoring is one of the significant methods used to prioritize projects. To score any project, a scoring profile is developed consisting of weighted categories and criteria. Categories are assigned a weight and values are assigned to the criteria. The project is scored by assessing each criterion and multiplying it by its weight. The total score for the project is based on the sum or average of all the weighted criteria scores.
- MoSCoW Technique:?This prioritization technique derives its name after the first letters of the following labels: Must have, Should have, Could have, and Wish to have. “Must have” requirements are mandatory and lay the foundation for any system. In the absence of these features, the system will not work or will have no value. “Should have” features are relatively important and should be present for the system to work correctly. “Could have” features are useful additions to the system that will add tangible value. “Wish to?have/Won't have” requirements are nice-to-have features that are noted in the backlog and will be added to the scope after the must-have, should-have, and could-have requirements are addressed.
- Dot Voting or Multivoting:?In this technique, each stakeholder is given a predetermined number of dots to distribute among the options provided. Each stakeholder distributes the dots as desired based on the priority they envision. Stakeholders may distribute all the dots to one option or give no dots to one of the options displayed. The facilitator then sums up the votes for each option. The option that receives the most votes is considered the top priority, and the one with the least votes has the lowest priority. A good rule of thumb to determine the number of votes each stakeholder gets is to give them votes for 20% of the total number of features or requirements that are to be prioritized.
- Requirements Prioritization Model:?This is a mathematically driven model to calculate the priority of features. In this model, benefits, cost, penalties, and risk are rated on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest) against all the proposed features. Then the features are rated on the benefit of having versus not having the feature. Additionally, the team rates the cost and risk of producing the feature versus not producing it. The score for each attribute is then summarized in the weighted formula to calculate the relative priority of features or projects.
- Return on Investment (ROI):?ROI measures the profitability of an investment that can deliver fast and maximize the returns by quickly producing valuable deliverables in a given timeframe. A project that yields the highest ROI is very likely to be prioritized by the organization to maximize benefits over the costs incurred by the organization.
- Minimal Viable Product (MVP) or Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF):?This approach is mainly applicable to agile methodology, where features are decomposed in the smallest marketable packages that deliver significant business value within the chosen timeboxed period. Those features that deliver the highest customer value are considered critical and are given the highest priority to be implemented before less significant features.
