Under Time Pressure?

Every business requirement expresses or implies a set of technical or system requirements. By identifying these technical requirements, you will increase your understanding of the business needs and avoid many misinterpretations.

To identify technical requirements, examine every business requirement and extract the following types of requirements:

Business Requirement Example:

Functional Requirement
(Action oriented)

What actions, steps or tasks have to be completed to satisfy this requirement?
Use verb - object format.

Business Requirement: The processing of a customer order with less than 50 items should be intuitively obvious and take no more than 1 hour using the current hardware platform.

 enter order  
 check customer credit
 verify item availability
 count items
 track processing time
 ..............

Informational Requirement
(Data oriented)

The data necessary for a function to work. This encompasses such varied concepts as entities, reports, screens, data elements, metadata, etc.

Business Requirement: The processing of a customer order with less than 50 items should be intuitively obvious and take no more than 1 hour using the current hardware platform.

 customer data
 order window
 date/time stamp
 item data
 number of items per order
 ..............

Performance Requirement
(Number oriented)

A measurable dimension of the system. An objective test should exist to determine whether the product meets expectations. This implies numbers.

Business Requirement: The processing of a customer order with less than 50 items should be intuitively obvious and take no more than 1 hour using the current hardware platform.

  less than 1 hour processing time for 1 order of 50 items
 ..............

Constraining Requirement
(Limit oriented)

A limit on how the functions will be performed. Forces external to the project mandate these rules but they affect the operation of the system.

Business Requirement: The processing of a customer order with less than 50 items should be intuitively obvious and take no more than 1 hour using the current hardware platform.

 current hardware platform
 ..............

Subjective Requirement
(Feeling oriented)

Aspects of the requirements that depend on how someone "feels" or interprets a word.

Business Requirement: The processing of a customer order with less than 50 items should be intuitively obvious and take no more than 1 hour using the current hardware platform.

 "intuitively obvious"
 "current" hardware platform
  ..............

Pick any uneven number below ten as a baseline (3, 5, 7 or 9).

Larger numbers enable refined differences but are typically more difficult to assign.

Every requirement is assigned the default priority which is in the center of your baseline

Example:
2 for a baseline of 3
5 for a baseline of 9
......

For every requirement that you want to assign a higher priority, you must select another requirement that will be assigned an offsetting lower priority.

The average priority will always be the center of your baseline.

Example: Start Prioritization (Baseline 5)

Example: Result of Prioritization (Baseline 5)