Prioritization is about determining the relative importance of business analysis information, such as the requirements.
There are four main prioritization approaches that you should be aware of:
- Grouping: This is when a business analyst facilitates a discussion where business analysis information is grouped based on categories such as high, medium, and low.
- Ranking: This is simply when the business analysis information is ranked from the most important to the least important. This is often applied as part of the prioritization of a product backlog.
- Timeboxing/budgeting: This is when business analysis information is prioritized based on a fixed allocation of a resource. This is most commonly based on how much work can be delivered within a specified time period with the resources available.
- Negotiation: This is when a consensus between stakeholders must be obtained to determine which requirements should be prioritized as more important to implement at any given point during the project's life cycle.
In some cases, a combination of these general prioritization approaches is applied.