Prioritize project requirements

- I love the Rolling Stones' song, You Can't Always Get What You Want, and it gets stuck in my head every time I have to prioritize the requirements for a project because as you go through the elicitation process, you can end up with a ton of requirements, but your project can't do everything. So, you need to prioritize and sometimes that leads to tough choices. This is where the work that we've done to survey requirement attributes and analyze our stakeholders becomes really helpful. First, we take a look at all of our requirements and look for potential conflicts. If one stakeholder needs our project to be black and another one needs it to be white, then we need to find a way to deconflict. We might need to choose either black or white or we may be able to compromise on a shade of gray. Next, we make sure that all of our requirements are truly unique. Are there duplicates or requirements that could be easily combined? Then, we check to make sure that our requirements aren't too complex. Sometimes it's better to break a single requirement into two or more simpler ones. Now, we can evaluate the importance of each requirement. For smaller projects, it might help to make this a simple binary choice. Each requirement is either necessary or optional, but for bigger projects with lots of requirements, we can rank their importance on a scale of one to 10. So, how do we determine the priority for our requirements? Well, that depends on the project. Sometimes prioritization is a team effort. It requires a vote or a consensus from several stakeholders. Other times, the project sponsor or the product manager gets to make the prioritization decisions. Last, but not least, of course we need to document our requirement priorities and we need to keep records of any changes. In most projects we can't do everything that everybody wants, so prioritizing your requirements helps you prepare for conversations about which items need to be in scope for a project and what resources will be required to achieve your project's goals successfully.