Prioritizing Requirements

How Does Your Company Develop Ideas and Prioritize Requirements?

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Today we’ll consider responses to two more questions from the Global Study of Product Team Performance. How do your organization’s practices compare to the findings shared by survey participants?

Question: How do you track, review, and develop ideas from your employees, customers, and suppliers? (Check one.)

 

Response Percentage
We have no formal processes and systems in place to track, develop, and manage ideas. It’s mainly done through emails, spreadsheets, and occasional brainstorming sessions. 48.2%
We use our CRM tool to store and manage ideas from our employees and customers. 14.2%
We have developed our own in-house solution using a portal and document management system. 15.4%
We use an off-the-shelf, cloud-based (or on premises) idea management system. 18.6%
Other 3.6%

 

What Responses Tell Us

Nearly half of all respondents (48.2%) indicated that their organizations have no formal system for tracking, developing, and managing ideas. Other responses were more equally distributed including use of a CRM tool (14.2%), reliance on an in-house solution (15.4%), and use of an off-the shelf cloud or premises-based system.

Question: What criteria do you use to prioritize requirements? (Check all that apply.)

Criteria to Prioritize Requirements

Response Percentage
Everything is a priority (nothing is a priority) 10.7%
Thumb in the wind 11.5%
Size/influence of customer 59.9%
Development cost 54.0%
Revenue 50.0%
Technical (architecture, stability, scalability) 46.8%
Risk (technical risk, market risk, product risk) 44.4%
Profitability 42.1%
Key internal stakeholder influence 38.9%

A Closer Look at Responses

Nearly 60% of respondents indicated that the size/influence of a customer is a primary way their organizations prioritize requirements. Respondents also highly rated development cost (54.0%), revenue (50%), technical criteria (46.8%), risk (44.4%), profitability (42.1%), and key internal stakeholder influence (38.9%). It is reassuring that thumb in the wind and treating everything as a priority ranked much lower as criteria for prioritizing requirements. These two earned just 11.5% and 10.7% responses respectively.

Coming Up

Next week we’ll take a closer look at team product backlog. We’ll also consider which product development requirement format makes on-boarding new employees easier.

 

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