Setting Priorities

As we discussed in Team Skill 2, Understanding User and Stakeholder Needs, establishing the relative priorities for the feature set is integral to scope management. During prioritization, it is important that the customers and users, product managers, or other representatives ”not the development team ”set the initial priorities. Indeed, this initial prioritization should be done without too much influence from the technical community; otherwise , the level of difficulty in implementing the features will influence customer priorities, and the result of the process will be compromised such that the application may not meet the real customer needs. There will be adequate opportunity for technical input at later phases of the prioritization process. In our project example, let's assume that we vote on the priority of each feature, using a critical-important-useful scale; the results of this exercise are shown in Table 18-1.