I was running a meeting with a few stakeholders. I was imploring them to indicate the relative importance of requirements, but was hitting a brick wall; they kept insisting, "They all look the same to me. All requirements are important. They all are must-haves."
I tried to reason with them multiple times over. There are just too many requirements, and cannot possibly implement all of them in the available time and/or budget. But they kept insisting that all requirements were indeed important.
I thought to myself, “Why are these people being so difficult? Why are they deliberately feigning ignorance?” I literally felt like tearing my hair out!
Have you been in this situation? I bet you have. Why is prioritization such a hard exercise? There must be a better way, right?
Let's rewind a little bit and review how we usually begin a Requirements Prioritization meeting: "Thanks for accepting this meeting. The purpose of this meeting is to prioritize the requirements. We are going to use the MoSCoW technique. Let us walk through each of the requirements and collectively decide whether this is a M, S, C or W."
Sounds familiar? If not exactly as stated above, it could be some flavor of the above. Instead of M, S, C or W, it could be some other rating mechanism. But, for the most part, the spirit is essentially the same.
My hypothesis is that, with the above expectations, stakeholders truly are not able to differentiate relative importance among requirements. They aren’t being difficult at all; they honestly cannot prioritize. Let me give you an analogy:
Imagine being in a corporate conference room. What can you find in there? Whiteboard, video con equipment, large table, uniform looking black chairs around the table, etc.
Suppose I ask you to arrange the chairs around the table in the decreasing order of blackness, what would you say to me? I imagine you would say, “They all look the same to me.” Exactly the way requirements appear to the stakeholders – all the same.
Suppose I give you a pair of glasses. Not any ordinary pair of glasses, but one that has spectrograph capability, and a display on the top right corner. When you wear this glass, and look at any object, a graph of various colors on the object along with their intensity represented numerically is displayed. Now would you be able to do arrange the chairs in their decreasing order of blackness? Sure you would!
Few questions to ponder over:
- You weren’t initially able to arrange the chairs in their decreasing degree of blackness. Is that your fault? Does it indicate your weakness? Or does it point towards my weakness of not knowing how to enable you to do that activity?
- Is it the stakeholders’ fault that they aren’t able to prioritize the requirements? Or is it my drawback as a BA that I wasn’t able to get them to “see” the relative importance among requirements?
Think it over. I would love to hear your comments. Let’s talk and engage in a productive discussion.
Meanwhile, in my next blog, I will write about the various glasses that you can provide to your stakeholders to get them to truly see the relative importance among requirements.