Prioritization & Goal Setting

MoSCoW Prioritization

Sort requirements into Must, Should, Could and Won't have, and keep the Must list honest.

Time: 30 to 60 min
With: Product owner with stakeholders
You get: A prioritized scope with an agreed Must list

How to use this worksheet

List all candidate requirements without ranking them yet.
Define what "Must" means for this release: without it the release is a failure or illegal or unsafe.
Move each item into Must, Should, Could or Won't (this time). Challenge every Must.
Keep Must items to roughly 60 percent of the effort so there is room for risk. The summary shows your split.

Requirements

Add requirements and move them between the four categories.

Must have

Without it the release fails

Should have

Important, but workarounds exist

Could have

Nice to have, if time allows

Won't have (this time)

Agreed to be out of scope

Prompts

Ask yourself

If this were missing on launch day, would we still launch?
Is there a workaround for this?

Scope split

Before you finish

Every Must has a clear reason.
At least a third of the work is not Must.
Won't items are agreed with stakeholders, not forgotten.

About MoSCoW

Dai Clegg developed MoSCoW at Oracle in the 1990s and it was adopted by the DSDM agile framework. The lower-case o's are only there to make the word readable.

The "Won't have" list is as important as the Must list: it protects the scope from creeping back in.