How Do You Prioritize When Everything is a Must Have?

Regardless of whether you're using the MSCW prioritization framework or something else, most stakeholders love to overload the higher priority categories. Let's take a look at why that happens and how to counter it.

The reason why priorities are inflated to begin with are typically one of these:

1. Fear of being deprioritized, which is essentially FOMO, as stakeholders worry their needs won't be met based on prior experience

2. Pressure from stakeholders rooted from either not knowing enough about the details or overreacting based on the catalyst for the initiative

3. Lack of success criteria outlining how teams will know whether a program, project, or feature meets expectations

If you don't have success criteria, stop reading now and go get some!

I heard Costco has a 30 pack available at a great price. It's in the freezer section. Because it's cold, like this joke.

In all seriousness, lack of success criteria makes it nearly impossible to discern whether a requirement must, should, could, or won't materially influence your initiative.

Let's take a look at three ways to balance priorities:

1. Identify your critical path between where you are now and what success looks like, which means having traceability between requirements and that path, plus any dependencies between requirements (e.g. you can't have something as could if a must depends on it)

2. Create time or capacity constraints to limit how much time or space within your sprints or overall project are dedicated to each category (e.g. 50% for must, 35% for should, 15% for could)

3. Use historical projects as the basis for identifying how much work can be reasonably delivered within a given amount of time, which is helpful even if the projects are still in progress or never finished (i.e. they were canceled)

If you're dealing with pressure from stakeholder groups, the critical path is often the best way to manage competing needs, as it (visually) demonstrates how to achieve success.

If your organization has struggled with priorities or delivery in the past, focus on using the first two ways and use historical projects as a sanity check.

TLDR: Understand the reasons why your stakeholders are overloading higher priority categories, then use critical path or time/space constraints to balance.