Website Functional Requirements Analysis - Setting Priorities
Feature Prioritization
After your brainstorming sessions you will need to identify which ideas that you are really
serious about pursuing and including in your website functional requirements document. Once you have
a good list of desirable features, it is time to start prioritizing them.
You can start by setting the priority of
each piece of functionality to either "critical", "important", or "optional." You may be tempted to drop a bunch of
the "optional" requirements off the list since it just adds confusion for the designers and developers. Unless you
are a designer or a developer, and you fully understand the complexity level of each of your functional requests,
it is not wise to drop off features that you would like before giving it to a technical person for review.
It is very common when business and marketing people to ask me to
build some website features that they have already come up with an assessment of
which features are difficult and which ones are easy to
implement. I would say that they are right about 50% of the time,
and the other 50% of the time they either thought
that the work would take weeks and I can do it in minutes,
or vice versa. Be sure to present your ideas to
your developers and designers and let them give you the
feedback on which ones will be challenging and then
you can decide if the value of feature justifies its price tag.
By establishing a known priority among all of the features, you are clearly
stating what is most important to you. Analysts and website developers
will use this information when designing and building the technical aspects
of the system. The more understandable your current priorities and future
plans are, the better the results will be. When it is time to add more features
it will be easier because the website was built with the future needs in mind.