harrah's case study customer relationship management

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• Sassi D Frini A Abdessalemkaraa W Kraiem N (2015) Multi-Criteria Decision Aid and Artificial Intelligence for Competitive Intelligence Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Current Approaches in Applied Artificial Intelligence - Volume 9101 10.1007/978-3-319-19066-2_17 (171-178) Online publication date: 10-Jun-2015 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-319-19066-2_17

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Teaching and learning

I recently met up with Dr. Simon Moore , a respected business and consumer psychologist who specializes in brand experience.

He is a master of unearthing the reasons consumers behave the way they do, and using those insights to help brands improve engagement.

I wanted to understand what it was that made case studies so useful in sales and marketing, and suspected that the answers lay in psychology.

I wasn't disappointed.

It turns out that effective sales and marketing is all about understanding the underlying emotional drivers of buyer behavior. And, when applied, those insights can help supercharge content.

This is what I learned.

How to Craft a More Compelling Case Study

For children across the world, stories are an integral—and, more important—enjoyable part of their bedtime ritual. So, it's not surprising that we are conditioned to like stories.

Trained as we are from a very early age, our brains have learned to process information through the medium of stories and to remember them.

But it goes much deeper than that.

Simon Explains

"Stories are psychologically friendly because the way they're structured is very neat. They have a start, middle, and end, which is easy for the brain to process. This is essential because despite having a huge amount of untapped potential we don't have unlimited brain power."

It's also why you should never present someone with a list of facts. That's really hard on the brain. There's no way of ordering it.

But you want people to remember what you told them. And when you put information in the context of a story, their brain is already geared to remember it.

When committing your case studies to the page or video, concentrate on the narrative. Case studies already have a three-part story structure built in: the problem, the solution, and the result. Use that structure to tell a compelling story.

When you do, you make your case study eminently more enjoyable to read or watch, and easier to digest, process, and recall.

People will remember it, internalize it, and work out its relevance for them; and, just as important, they will also be able to pass it on.

How to Move From 'Me Too' to 'Perfect Partner'

In psychology, it's called empathetic intelligence , and it plays a major role in our enjoyment of stories.

It's our ability to listen to a story about somebody else—and put ourselves in their shoes.

As a result, you can experience events that you may never witness yourself, and you get a feel for what it would be like to be there. You can travel to various periods in history, experience life on far-flung planets, and encounter people you would likely never have the chance to meet.

More important for your sales and marketing, you give your market the opportunity to play out scenarios that they may be personally experiencing, and so also assess the (positive) outcome you promise.

"Stories allow you to safely test scenarios without the risks. You automatically play the action back to your own situation. You tweak what you are watching or reading or hearing to fit your own circumstance and play them out as if you were the one in the story."

Empathetic intelligence is the reason soap operas are so popular: When watching them, we are asking what we would do were we in that situation. You automatically put yourself in that situation—assessing both risk and potential gain or loss for you.

Tell your client's story. Outline the challenges they wanted you to fix and why those challenges were occurring. Explain how you helped to fix problems and describe what life/work was like for your client after the solution was implemented.

In a world where trust is hard to win, your client's story will not only help your prospect safely play out the resolution of their own challenges but also position you as the perfect option as a provider of the solution.

The more relatable the story, the more your prospects will connect with it.

How to Increase Urgency

In some ways, we are simple creatures. Despite having accomplished incredible things scientifically, we remain very close to the cave psychologically.

"Reward-and-punishment is still the thing that guides us. The way that we navigate the world is to avoid the things that make us feel anxious and scared, and seek out the things that make us feel good."

For the majority of us, fear is the greater force.

Though we like the idea of losing weight or saving money for a rainy day, there's nothing like a health scare to get you in the gym, or the knock of a bailiff to get you to cut up your credit cards.

In you case study, focus in on the problems that your client was struggling with. Make it personal. The more someone can see their own situation reflected in the story, the greater the emotional connection.

Think about how the story hooks into their own concerns: What are the things that keep them up at night? These are not questions about the business, per se; these are questions about the people you are looking to attract.

When you do, you will stimulate your prospect's empathetic intelligence. Seeing their own situation reflected back will increase their unease and make your solution and the results it delivers, all the more compelling.

How to Increase Desire

It's the question we ask ourselves before making any decision, big or small: What's in it for me?

No matter how generous, altruistic, or selfless a person is, that question is always there in the background, influencing his or her actions.

Because, ultimately, we all have the same drive in common: looking after number-one.

"When you tell people who you are and what you do, it rarely engages—because they can't see their ego in that. The ego is asking very different questions: Where am I in this scenario? What will I get out of it?"

Results are important. Vital, even. But what makes the results that much more compelling is the impact they've had on the person who hired you.

When outlining the results of the project, describe what they meant to your client—things like...

• How you made them look to their team and higher ups
• How you helped progress their career or save it
• How you freed their time up to spend on the things they enjoy

Remember, saving money or time or increasing efficiency isn't what's at stake; it's what those things mean to a person that makes them meaningful. If saving money is going to save your job, then that's what's really important.

How to Boost the Feel-Good Factor

The way we perceive the world can be split in two: what we think about it; how we feel about it.

What we think is important. It's the logical side of who we are. We look at the world around us and assess each element to determine its appropriateness.

You view a pair of shoes and assess whether they are fitting for the activities you intend to use them for. You then put them on to ensure they're the right size for your feet.

However, ultimately, those logical reasons only contribute to the decision to buy. What seals the deal is how you feel about the shoes—your real reasons why you purchase.

"The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman demonstrated that we have two cognitive systems that impact our decisions: One is emotionally influenced, and one is more rational/pragmatic. His research proved that emotional drivers generally have greater influence on our decision-making and behavior than more rational and logical ones."

The shoes may be the right fit and they may be appropriate for the job at hand, but if they don't say what you want them to say about you and they don't reflect what you want others to think about the person you are, you likely won't buy them.

When telling your customer's story, don't concentrate on what they bought from you. Focus on why they bought it from you.

What was it that got them personally engaged? How did you make them feel good about their purchase? How did you help allay their concerns about you and your products?

Those factors are far-flung from the logic of features and benefits. They are the food of emotional need.

Unleash the Power of Your Case Studies

Keep in mind the above-outlined five ways of amping up the power of case studies, and you'll create high-impact, prospect-pulling, mean marketing machines.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Moscow is the owner of 9mm Public Relations , a boutique communications consultancy that helps B2B businesses build profile, pipeline, and profit. Check out its case study audit tool .

LinkedIn: Alex Moscow

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The MoSCoW method for prioritization: A guide for agile teams

In the messy world of technology, there is an immeasurable demand for the resources from product and development teams. This is where prioritization comes into play.

Prioritization is one of the core responsibilities of the product manager. With the proper prioritization framework and/or criteria, the product manager can save their team resources while moving closer to the business goals.

In this article, we will dive deep into one of the most widely used prioritization techniques, the MoSCoW method.

What is the MoSCoW method?

The MoSCoW method (also known as MoSCoW analysis) is one of many qualitative prioritization techniques used to prioritize features, user stories, and requirements.

The MoSCoW method groups the features into four groups:

• Should-have
• Could-have (or nice-to-have)

1. Must-have

Features or stories are critical for the product’s success. These features represent the non-negotiables which, if not implemented successfully, might put the product at risk of failing.

For example, let’s say you are the PM of a university’s e-learning system. A must-have feature might be the assignment submission feature because it serves a primary and essential need for both ideal customer profiles.

2. Should-have

This classification represents the features that are important, but not as crucial as the must-haves. These features, if not implemented, can cause a severe risk to the product’s success, but their risk is lower than the must-haves.

Typically, product teams use this classification for minor bug fixes and/or performance improvement initiatives.

Returning to our example, a should-have feature for our e-learning system might be an integrated plagiarism tool for teachers to use. This can be a should-have because it would not stop the teachers from doing their work, but not implementing it might lead them to churn and move to other platforms that save them time.

3. Could-have (or nice-to-have)

This classification represents desirable features that are not important to the core function of the product. Not implementing this feature will not cause any risk or failure.

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Could-have features might help your product or do nothing at all. Features that are tagged with the could-have classification end up deprioritized and treated as a sprint filler.

For our e-learning, one feature could be the ability for the teachers to message other students through the platform. This is nice-to-have because this problem is typically dealt with through email and other platforms.

4. Won’t-have

This classification represents features that are not aligned with the vision and the strategy of the product. These are the features requested by other departments or stakeholders, but are entirely irrelevant.

If we were to reflect this in our e-learning example, this might be a feature that enables teachers to develop a curriculum collaboratively on the platform. This feature is a won’t-have because it doesn’t align with the vision of the product because the product is intended to mainly serve the students.

MoSCoW prioritization template

The MoSCoW prioritization method can be used to prioritize both the product backlog and the sprint backlog . This tells engineers what they need to deliver first and gives them an idea of what task could potentially spill over into the next sprint.

Below is a simple template that can get you up and running with the MoSCoW prioritization technique:

History of the MoSCoW method

The MoSCoW method was introduced first in 1994 by Dai Clegg , a British business consultant and software engineer.

Clegg was working on a software project with the British government and was looking for a method to prioritize the system requirements based on their urgency and criticality. He came up with the MoSCoW method to rank and prioritize the features and ensure the right investments were put into the top features.

How to use the MoSCoW prioritization method (5 steps)

Using the MoSCoW in the real world is more than tagging features with four different tags. It requires additional steps to ensure the proper prioritization is put into place and that features align with your stakeholders.

To apply the MoSCoW prioritization method in product management, take the following steps:

1. Groom your features

It is always a best practice to start by listing your features in your product backlog. Add some details to them like the basic idea of the feature, some simple user flows, and wireframes, and meet with your engineers/technical navigators, or system analysts to check on the technical feasibility and the edge cases.

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2. Prioritize initially

After you have all of your features groomed, start prioritizing them. Classify them into must-have, should-have, could-have, and won’t-have. Prioritize based on the available resources and insights gathered from any user research and product analytics.

3. Align with your stakeholders

Present your initial priority to your stakeholders. Gather their input and try to persuade them of your priority based on the insights and the data you have.

Don’t leave the meeting without alignment on the priority of each feature. The outcome of the meeting should be a prioritized list agreed on by each and every stakeholder.

4. Adjust your roadmap and announce

After finalizing the backlog, make sure to give it a final review and announce it publicly using your internal roadmap and any communication channel that includes all the stakeholders.

5. Communicate continuously

We are in the agile era . That means we should embrace change and understand that changes happen all the time.

A feature that is a could-have in this quarter might be a must-have in the next one. So make sure to communicate changes in the business and feature priorities continuously with your stakeholders.

Ensure all the related documents, like the roadmap and the backlog , are updated accordingly and on a timely basis to avoid any miscommunication and to make sure that everyone is aligned on the timeline and the priorities.

Final thoughts

The MoSCoW method is one of the most powerful and widely used prioritization techniques worldwide. It helps classify features and initiatives into four groups.

For the MoSCoW method to be applied effectively and deliver the intended value, it should include a lot of stakeholder alignment and involvement. The product manager should dedicate more time to the must-have features to come up with a killer solution that helps solve the major problem for the users.

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Ranking Requirements Using MoSCoW Methodology in Practice

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• First Online: 05 July 2022
• Cite this conference paper

• Tatiana Kravchenko   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6479-6250 10 ,
• Tatiana Bogdanova   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0018-2946 10 &
• Timofey Shevgunov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1444-983X 11  

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 503))

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Requirement prioritization is performed in order to analyze business requirements and to define the required capabilities leading to potential solutions that will fulfill stakeholder needs. During the analysis, the needs and informal concerns are transformed into formal solution requirements describing the behavior of solution components in details. The developed models can describe the current state of the organization and are used for validating the solution scope among mangers and stakeholders. This facilitates identification of open opportunities for improvement or assists stakeholders in understanding the current state. Several techniques have been applied for requirements prioritization in a case study of the conventional commercial bank where the main problems of the communication management process have been formulated and illustrated by the fishbone diagram. The MoSCoW technique has been applied to identification of four requirement groups, whose impact on the results principally differ within the scope of the identified problems. The obtained list of prioritized requirements should be used on next project stages since it will be exploited by the managers during their planning future jobs on the solution implementation. The paper results are aimed at helping the stakeholders develop a common point of view on the strategic goals of the project.

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Kravchenko, T., Bogdanova, T., Shevgunov, T. (2022). Ranking Requirements Using MoSCoW Methodology in Practice. In: Silhavy, R. (eds) Cybernetics Perspectives in Systems. CSOC 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 503. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09073-8_18

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• Product Management

MoSCoW Method: How to Make the Best of Prioritization

Prioritization played a significant role in the success of most feature-rich apps, such as Slack and GitLab . Initially, they offered a limited set of functionalities that were essential for their users. With time, this set was supplemented with other features. Railsware is going to share its own style of prioritizing and show you how we use the MoSCoW method to get long lists of tasks done.

Why do you need prioritization?

As a rule, the daily routine includes a bunch of tasks. Ideally, you’ll have enough time and energy to cover all of them – but it just might happen that the number of tasks is immense and the resources available are not in abundance. That’s where prioritization comes in.

This term denotes a process to filter what you have to do in order of importance or relevance. For example, if you’re building a house, you are not likely to begin with the roof or walls until your foundation is done. Of course, things are much more complicated in the web development industry, and this example cannot reveal the full-scope value of setting priorities.

Complex projects and numerous startups make use of advanced prioritization techniques. These usually consist of frameworks known for specific requirements or rules that improve decision-making. Success in prioritization often determines the success of the company itself. Getting caught up in pending and undone tasks is a straight road to failure. That’s why businesses pay particular attention to which prioritization methods to use. There are quite a few of them, but they all have some common characteristics, such as orientation towards input (internal or external) and quantitative or qualitative tools.

By the way, we are hiring. Check out our job openings.

External orientation means that you need to involve stakeholders outside the development team to set priorities, while the internally-oriented methods can be executed purely in-house. Quantitative methods entail a deeper focus on numeric metrics in prioritization, and the qualitative one rests on expert opinions, votings, classifications to a greater extent. In view of this, they are traditionally divided into the following categories:

You can read about different Agile prioritization techniques in detail here . If you need, we’ve also gone more in depth on what Agile product development is in a separate article.

Railsware prefers a technique developed by Dai Clegg way back in 1994. Initially, it was named MSCW, but two o’s were added to improve pronounceability. This also made it sound like the capital city of Russia. Let’s see how it works.

What is MoSCoW?

To understand the gist of the MoSCoW method, we need to look at its origin – the dynamic systems development method (DSDM). It is a framework for Agile project management tailored by practitioners with the aim of improving quality in rapid app development (RAD) processes. A hallmark of DSDM projects is strictly determined quality, costs, and time at an early stage. In view of this, all the project tasks have to be allocated by importance. The need for managing priorities triggered the invention of a specialized prioritization mechanism.

This mechanism was implemented via MoSCoW – a simple yet powerful solution to set priorities both with and without timeboxes. However, it shows better efficiency if you have a certain deadline for a task, feature, subfeature, functionality, etc. The framework is applicable to all levels of project prioritization from top to bottom, as well as to all functions and focus areas.

The MoSCoW abbreviation (except for the o’s) is carved with first letters of the priority categories it works with. These are Must-haves, Should-haves, Could-haves and Won’t-haves. And that’s how you can define which task falls into which category.

Prioritization rules

These rules or requirements estimate the importance of any task/process/feature/etc. Each company or work team uses its own approach to setting requirements, but, in general, they do not differentiate much and look as follows.

These are top-priority requirements, which shape the foundation of the major pipeline. Avoiding them means blocking the entire project or further activities. As a rule, product ideation depends entirely on defining must-haves using such pointers as ‘required for launch’, ‘required for safety’, ‘required for validation’, ‘required to deliver a viable solution’, etc.

• Can we move forward with the project if this task is undone? – if NO , it’s MUST .

Should-haves

This type of requirement is of secondary priority. Should-haves do not affect the launch and, traditionally, are considered important but not crucial. They differ from must-haves by the availability of a workaround. Therefore, the failure of a should-have task is unlikely to cause the failure of the entire project. If you’re building a product, it will still be usable even if these requirements aren’t met.

• Will we move forward with the project if this task is done a bit later? – if YES , it SHOULD .

Could-haves

The next requirement is less important than the two previous ones but still wanted. If we compare could-haves with should-haves, the former is defined by a lower degree of adverse effect if omitted. Traditionally, the third-level priority requirements in the Agile framework MoSCoW are realized if a project is not highly constrained in time. Within the product development, we can call them low-cost tweaks.

• Can we sacrifice this task till the deadline? – if YES , it’s COULD .

Won’t-haves

You can also encounter this type of requirement under the name of would-have or wish-to-have, but these variants are not recognized by the Wiki . However, regardless of the chosen name, these requirements define the lowest priority for tasks that are unviable to implement with a particular budget and deadline. Won’t-have does not mean a complete rejection of something. It envisions reintroduction under favorable conditions in the future.

• Can we get back to it when things are going better? – if YES , it’s WON’T .

In search of the perfect tools and techniques, our team often modifies some well-known approaches and tailors them to our needs. This constant search and improvement led us to brand new product ideation and decision-making framework: BRIDGeS . BRIDGeS is a flexible approach for multi-context analysis suitable for building effective product strategies, solving operational and strategic problems, making day-to-day decisions , and more. Find out how to use BRIDGeS and what advantages BRIDGeS can bring to your team .  

MoSCoW is another tool that we modified to make it even more flexible and versatile. Below, we share our findings to help your team nail prioritization in a more efficient way.

How the Railsware team modified MoSCoW

The main difference between the classical MoSCoW and our version of this technique is that we added another level of prioritization within such groups as Must, Should, and Could. Each of these groups of requirements got another 4 complexity categories :

• 3 – most heavy and unclear requirements
• 2 – heavy complexity
• 1 – normal complexity
• 0 – easiest and the most urgent tasks within the group

This way, when a requirement gets, let’s say, the priority Must, we can also add a numeric matter to the letter M. For instance, our sprint can include several M2 tasks, one M1 task, and three S1 tasks.

When the task is marked with the priority “3” (M3/S3/C3), it most likely means that its scope is too large and complex to be fulfilled fast. You need to decompose it into smaller, manageable chunks and prioritize them as well. This way, from one M3 requirement, you can get a bunch of M2, S1, and C1 tasks, for example.

Sometimes, M, S, C, and W letters are not enough and we may also need an Urgent Must (UM) mark. UMs are the most critical things, such as hotfixes, bug fixes, and patches, which block the work of the whole team. From our experience, we recommend you to fix these tasks ASAP, as they hinder the team’s productive work. So if you set any task as UM, you should ignore all other tasks until the UM task is fixed. In normal situations, your bug tracking system shouldn’t have UMs.

Why do Urgent Must tasks appear? Often, UMs are the Must-haves that your team ignored before the deployment phase or missed during the QA phase. Pay attention to these tricky cases, and try to solve them before they become an obstacle.

Advantages of the modified MoSCoW approach

When we got an additional level of priorities within the MoSCoW system, we felt the following improvements:

• No need to run several rounds of task prioritization . When you have six Must-have requirements, you can’t understand which of them are the most critical or complex and run another round of prioritization. Our approach allows us to set priorities and clearly understand the importance and complexity of each task from the first round.
• Saved time . The ability to set all priorities at once saves time for all the team members who take part in the prioritization process.
• More balanced sprints. A sprint that consists only of Must-have tasks has little chance of being fulfilled. Must-haves are usually more complex requirements that guarantee the viability of a product, meaning their implementation takes more time and concentration from a developer. To dilute high-importance work with some low-hanging tasks, you can add some S0, C0, or S1 tasks to the sprint so that users get a bit more full-featured functionality of the main Must-have flows.
• More pleasant products for end users . While M3 and M2 tasks are usually crucial things necessary for the product viability, Could- and Should-haves may represent more pleasant things (changing a theme, additional filters, notifications, etc.) 

How to use MoSCoW

Everything looks simple in theory, but is it in practice? Let’s check out how a traditional MoSCoW analysis of functionality prioritizing works through the example of a regular web application. As a sample, we’re going to use basic functions taken from one of the Railsware products .

List all tasks

Prioritize cards.

Based on particular requirements for budget and time, we can single out the most fundamental features to be implemented in the minimum viable product . After the priority analysis, we’ve got the following:

• A user MUST sign up.
• A user MUST log in.
• A user MUST reset password.
• A user MUST open a time-tracking page.

The top-priority tasks are followed by important, though not vital,functionalities for the app. These are:

• A user SHOULD choose the billing system.
• A user SHOULD delete an account.
• A user SHOULD choose time-tracking options.

The evolution of the app does foresee its availability on mobile devices. However, this task is only nice-to-have at this point.

• A user COULD install a mobile app version.

And now the least-priority feature. It aims at enhancing the user experience once the app is on track. Theme selectability is definitely not what we’re going to make now, so this feature is saved for later.

• A user WON’T choose the app’s visual theme THIS TIME.

Restructure cards according to their priority

This step allows you to see the quantitative ratio of high and low priority tasks.

The most difficult thing about prioritization is to be icily intelligent and focus on the essential tasks to be done. Otherwise, you can get into the EVERYTHING-IS-MUST trap , according to which any feature like the billing system option or mobile app availability turns into the must-have.

And that’s why the MoSCoW Agile method is cool. It allows you to define a basic feature set, which has top priority and emphasizes that you do not need to abandon anything. The healthy balance of must-haves + should-haves is 50% of the entire scope. All (or almost all) of the tasks will be implemented later but in the order of their importance to your goal. The goal of this example is to build an MVP , and the categorization above shows the expected progress of the app’s functionality.

How to use modified MoSCoW

We took the same example with all the tasks listed above to showcase how we apply our version of this prioritization technique.

Set priorities using the extended MoSCoW model

The main priority (Must, Should, Could, and Won’t) are still the same, however, we dived deeper to make a more precise priority estimation of each task. Here’s what we came up with:

• “A user can sign up” got an M2 mark. It is a complex task, but it’s not critically urgent.
• “A user can log in” got an M1 mark. The task is important but not that complex.
• “A user can reset password” got an M1 mark. 
• “A user can choose the billing system” got an S3 mark. It’s an important feature, but its scope is large and should be split.
• “A user can delete the account” got an S2 mark. 
• “A user can open a time-tracking page” got an M2 mark. 
• “A user can choose time-tracking options” got an S1 mark. This is a low-hanging feature that can be taken to a sprint to balance the workload.  
• “A user can install a mobile app version” got a C3 mark. This epic is too large to be implemented in one sprint. Its scope should be split into smaller tasks and prioritized as well.
• “A user can choose the app’s visual theme” got the same priority mark – Won’t, which we do not decompose.

Our modified approach provides a better understanding of the task’s priority and complexity and shows the parts that need to be reconsidered. This way, it’s easier to plan a balanced sprint, taking only tasks that can be implemented (all cards with the priority “3” should be split into smaller tasks) and some small tasks that allow your team to reduce the workload. 

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MoSCoW pros and cons

The framework is quite popular among Agile projects with fixed timeboxes since it allows for managing the requirements for a specific release of a product. This prioritization method has proved its efficiency and reliability within our company as well, and we do recommend it to our clients. However, it is not perfect of course, and an unbiased look can reveal some flaws associated with MoSCoW technique. Let’s take a look at its strengths and weaknesses.

MoSCoW prioritization at Railsware

Let’s take a look at how we set priorities within the company.

Product development: we rest upon a roadmap where the product features and the order of their implementation are specified. As a rule, we leverage MoSCoW to define which feature goes first, which comes second, and so on, taking into account their importance and the interdependence of features. Must-haves and Should-haves are meant for the product release. Could-haves and Won’t-haves are postponed for the future.

HR and recruitment: prioritization rests upon such requirements as the demand for particular expertise, budget availability, timebox (how urgently we need this expertise), and so on. We leverage the similar patterns of setting priorities in other focus areas including on-boarding, branding, marketing, etc.

The biggest challenge of the methodology is that all stakeholders must be familiar with enough context to estimate features correctly. Besides, stakeholders that represent different functions like sales, development, marketing have their own vision of setting priorities, which not always works towards correct prioritization. Investors usually treat all features as Must-haves from their broad-based perspective and need them done without any respect of their implementation order.

Railsware has a Holacratic organizational structure . We take advantage of collective leadership based on the RASCI model and make decisions on different things including prioritization through voting. Team members can choose from several options like really want, want and don’t want. Each option implies a particular point. The option with the biggest point total has the highest priority. For small contexts, a responsible role (team leader, project manager, etc.) can be in charge of setting priorities on his/her own.

MoSCoW alternatives you may find useful for your project

Railsware uses Agile framework MoSCoW heavily and is pleased with it. However, it does not mean that we are closed to other solutions. Besides, a good product manager must consider the key product metrics and build the prioritization according to them. So here are some other worthwhile techniques that you may benefit from.

With this framework, you can define how happy the users are with product features. The Kano Model rests on a questionnaire, which is used to learn users’ attitude to a particular feature (like, expect, dislike, neutral, etc.). Visually, the model can be expressed via a two-dimensional diagram where the vertical axis is responsible for the level of user satisfaction (from totally frustrated to incredibly happy) and the horizontal one shows either how much was invested in the feature (Investment), how well was it implemented (Implementation), or how much users benefit from it (Functionality).

Categorization of requirements includes four types that are prioritized in the following order: must-be, performance, attractive, and indifferent. Must-bes are some basic things that users generally expect. Performance (also known as One-Dimensional) requirements are the golden mean and allow you to increase the satisfaction level. Attractive requirements are those that improve user experience. These are nice-to-haves or could-haves according to MoSCoW. Indifferent ones are less prioritized and sometimes even entirely omitted.

Value vs. Complexity

This prioritization technique is one of the simplest. You can encounter it under the names of Value vs. Cost or Value vs. Effort as well. The method feels intuitive and is aimed at maximizing value delivery. Estimation of features’ importance rests upon how much effort is invested to implement them and how much value they will bring. Here is how it looks visually:

Wrapping up

The art of setting priorities shows the efficiency of your workflow. Railsware’s choice is the MoSCoW project management framework, which has made a good showing in versatile functionalities and products. However, it might be less useful for immense projects with multiple teams involved in the pipeline. We advise you to find an effective prioritization solution that fits your unique needs, and to always avoid getting caught up in countless pending tasks.

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