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INTERVIEW QUESTION:

How is the 100-point method used to prioritize requirements?

Posted by Chris Adams

// 49944 Views // 2 Additional Answers & Comments

Categories: Business Analysis, Systems Analysis, Requirements Analysis (BABOK KA)

ANSWER

The 100-point method is a prioritization method that can be used to prioritize items in a group environment. Each person within the group is given 100 points which they can distribute as votes across the available items. The votes do not need to be distributed equally; rather a weighted distribution can be used to reflect the higher priority that some items warrant.

Imagine that a group was trying to prioritize 5 items. A person could decide that each item is of equal importance and assigned 20 points to each. Or, they could decide that item 1 is more important than 2 which is more important than 3, and so on, and therefore spread the votes out in a weighted fashion where item 1 gets 40 votes, item 2 gets 30 votes, item 3 gets 15 votes, etc, until all of the votes are allocated. Each person allocates their 100 points. Then all of the votes are added to determine the final vote count for each item resulting in the prioritized list.

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Chris Adams
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ADDITIONAL ANSWERS / COMMENTS

zarfman posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 10:58 PM

Greetings:

Hopefully, each person writes down the way they split up the 100 points. Collect the votes. Wait a day or two and ask each person to use their 100 points to rank the items from least important to most important. See if there is any consistency in their ranking. If not what does one do?

We can also ask the question, do all the participants have similar or equal knowledge? If not do we assign weights to each participant? How do we do that?

Perhaps, we can use non-parametric statistics to determine if each participants rankings are similar or is one or more of the participants way out of sync with the others.

We can also ask the question, are the items being ranked independent of each other? If the highest ranked it is influenced by the item in second place then what do we do?

Regards,

Zarfman

Kirk Fleming posted on Tuesday, September 18, 2012 11:37 PM

This is a simple and fairly quick method of getting a priority--with the emphasis on simple. It is foremost a vote or opinion poll--and I believe you have to be willing to accept that as the price paid for quick and simple. I've not done one of these using this method, but I'd bet it is exceptionally successful (that is, the 'right' priorities are generally arrived at).

It reminds me, in a way, of listening for the loudest of 'yeas' and 'nays'.

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