Prioritizing with the MSCW Framework

There are many frameworks for prioritizing, although MSCW stands out as being easily understood by functional and technical stakeholders with its unambiguous definitions.

MSCW (pronounced “Moscow” like mules and Russia) expands to:

  • Must have

  • Should have

  • Could have

  • Won’t have

Labeling part of a business process, feature, or task with MSCW cuts through the nonsense of alternative methods like “high, medium, low” or “P0, P1, etc”.

Let’s define these to ensure there is no ambiguity:

  • Must have means it is critical to the success of whatever you’re delivering; if it doesn’t exist, you cannot achieve your objectives

  • Should have are equally as important as must have, but workarounds exist or a less than ideal state is tolerable

  • Could have are helpful in achieving an ideal state but are not critical, and often referred to as “nice to have”

  • Won’t have is exactly as it sounds; it might be something that is still positive or value additive, but lacks importance or criticality

Applying this to a real life scenario, we’re making a birthday cake for someone that loves pineapple upside down cake, and the person that was supposed to make it calls an hour before the party to tell us we need to make any cake, it just has to be cake.

  • Must have a fully baked center

  • Should have the traditional sugar glaze topping

  • Could have pineapple slices and/or cherries

  • Won’t have numbered or sparkler candles 

There are a few ways that MSCW (or any prioritization framework) can be overloaded to have everything as the must have (or highest priority). We’ll take a look at how to counter that in a future post.

TLDR: Try using MSCW to prioritize your own work and introduce it to your team if you’re struggling with another prioritization framework.

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