Introduction: Why Requirements Prioritisation Matters
Requirements prioritisation is one of the most critical—and often most challenging—activities a Business Analyst will face. With limited time, resources, and stakeholder attention, it’s essential to focus on delivering the most valuable outcomes first. But how do you determine which requirements truly matter most?
Whether you’re working in Agile, Waterfall, or a hybrid model, requirements prioritisation ensures that teams make informed, transparent decisions about scope and sequencing. It’s not just about choosing what comes first—it’s about managing trade-offs, aligning with business goals, and gaining stakeholder buy-in.
In this article, we’ll explore popular requirements prioritisation techniques, from MoSCoW and Weighted Scoring to simple ranking methods. You’ll learn when and how to apply them, and how to tailor your approach to suit the needs of your project, team, and organisational context.
Key Takeaways: Mastering Requirements Prioritisation
- Requirements prioritisation aligns delivery with business value, helping teams focus on what matters most to stakeholders.
- There’s no one-size-fits-all technique—choosing the right method depends on your project size, complexity, and stakeholder environment.
- Popular techniques like MoSCoW, WSJF, and 100-Point Method offer structured ways to make prioritisation discussions more objective and collaborative.
- Effective prioritisation requires facilitation, not just analysis—your role as a Business Analyst is to support consensus and manage competing interests.
- Requirements prioritisation helps manage scope and expectations, reducing risk and improving decision-making throughout the project lifecycle.
About Requirements Prioritisation Techniques
When prioritising requirements, it’s important to ensure stakeholder involvement in the process. Business Analysts typically elicit requirements through workshops, documented sources, and existing systems and processes. They then document the requirements and present them to stakeholders for prioritisation or removal from scope, usually during a workshop.
If time permits, prioritisation may also occur during requirements sessions. However, let’s assume that the final validation of requirements occurs after the initial gathering stage in another workshop with key stakeholders and decision makers. The objective is to prioritise requirements and processes that are more valuable to the organisation. For instance, high priority requirements may be processes that help the business increase revenue or mitigate risks. Lower priority requirements are those that provide minimal impact to organisational outputs or end user experience.
In this post I will describe 5 common requirements prioritisation techniques.
But firstly…
Weighting Requirements
With any prioritisation technique it’s good practice to combine several other criteria to weight requirements. This provides a structured framework for determining which requirement is more important than another, i.e., it helps make sensible decisions on the prioritisation. The criteria may include business importance, technical complexity, risk, and cost to implement. You may also include ongoing cost and return on investment as part of the evaluation. Stakeholders determine the criteria for weighting requirements, which can include anything relevant to the organisational need.
I’ve used a similar approach for assessing and recommending a technology option for implementation. I provide an example of this in How to Develop a Recommendation for the Implementation of a System.
You assign a weighted score to each requirement based on the predefined prioritisation criteria. The higher a requirement scores, the stronger its case for implementation.
Essential Integrations
Another factor to consider is “essential integrations”. This is where an output depends on an input, or a requirement or feature can’t exist without the other(s). Essential integrations have an impact on the prioritisation according to the above criteria because we are now looking at a pair or group of requirements and not just a siloed statement with no understanding or consideration of how it works with the whole.
You should identify essential integrations and define the prioritisation criteria—especially risk—early in the process, so you can apply them effectively with the prioritisation techniques discussed below.
5 Requirements Prioritisation Techniques
I asked these questions in three LinkedIn groups:
What is your preferred requirements prioritisation technique? Why do you use it?
The result is the following list covering the common requirements prioritisation techniques.
1. MoSCoW Prioritisation
The most popular answer to my LinkedIn question was MoSCoW as it is one of the most simplest techniques to use.
Here’s a YouTube video by BA Experts demonstrating how the MoSCoW technique works, Requirements Prioritization: Two Simple Techniques. And the transcript for the video is here: Transcript for Requirements Prioritization: Two Simple Techniques. It also includes a demonstration of the Needs-Based prioritisation technique which is a technique I’ve used often.
2. Needs-Based Analysis
As mentioned above, another simple technique is the Needs-Based prioritisation technique which distinguishes between what people really need versus what they would like to have. This technique is thoughtfully explained on this video, Requirements Prioritization: Two Simple Techniques.
3. Crowd Sourcing
You can use crowdsourcing to determine what’s needed by gathering feedback and ideas from a large group of people. The article Why Business Analysts Need to Listen to the Crowd: Crowdsourcing Requirements Elicitation, says this:
… the guess of the crowd almost always turns out to be better than your guess, or the guess of anybody in your organization. That is why products developed with feedback from the crowd (the bigger the crowd, the better) will almost always be superior to products developed only with input from experts.
You can use crowdsourcing to incorporate the voice of the user and generate an initial prioritised list of requirements.
4. Dot Voting
‘Dot voting’ is another form of democratised feedback where each stakeholder gets typically 3-5 dots to put against one or more features. It works well when you need to understand priorities at a high level and gets stakeholders to focus on the key priorities. It’s fun way to relate to the stakeholders and have them interact in a positive way. Here’s a good article on dot voting: Prioritising requirements – how to do it and why it is critical to project success.
5. Buy a Feature
‘Buy a feature’ is another fun technique that empowers the business as they’re making the choices. It’s a great way to get stakeholder buy in. Each stakeholder receives imaginary money to spend on the features they want, with each feature assigned a value based on its size. Together, they collaborate to ‘buy’ the most important features to be delivered within the agreed timespan. This method can produce good results. Here’s a useful article that discusses the buy a feature technique: How to play the ‘Buy a feature’ design game.
Final Thoughts: Clarity Through Requirements Prioritisation
At its core, requirements prioritisation is about making value-driven decisions. It empowers teams to move forward with confidence, knowing they’re working on the right things at the right time. As a Business Analyst, your ability to guide this process—and tailor it to your team’s needs—can make the difference between a successful delivery and a stalled initiative.
Remember, prioritisation isn’t a one-time event. It’s an ongoing conversation that evolves as projects shift and new information emerges. By mastering requirements prioritisation techniques, you’ll bring clarity to complexity and ensure your analysis leads to real, actionable results.
Ready to apply these techniques? Choose one that fits your current project and give it a try—you’ll be surprised how quickly it adds structure, insight, and alignment to your work.