Lesson 6: Define criteria for prioritizing elements
To prioritize elements in a structured way, use criteria. When you prioritize elements, you can identify information to support portfolio and product management decisions. For instance, which features must be included in the next release? What risks are most severe? Which competitors constitute the largest threat? While some criteria are represented by facts, such as price and type, others represent relative aspects, such as design appeal.
In this lesson, you create two criteria: “Design appeal” and “Price”. You can use these criteria to compare the cars.
Prerequisite
To define criteria, you must complete the previous lessons in this tutorial.
Video: How to define criteria for prioritizing elements in Focal Point®
1 Log in to Focal Point® as Veena Doe and open the Cars workspace.
2 From the Display menu, select Criteria.
3 On the Criteria page, add a criterion named “Design appeal”. Click Add Criterion, and then specify the following details:
▪ In the Title field, type:
Design appeal
▪ In the Description field, type:
This criterion represents the design appeal of the car.
▪ Ensure that Objective is set to Maximize, because this criterion is positive.
▪ In the Question field, type:
Which car looks better?
Specifying a question is optional, but is useful for guiding stakeholders about how to respond to the criterion.
4 Click OK. The Design appeal criterion is listed on the Criteria page.
5 Add another criterion named Price. Click Add Criterion and specify the following details.
▪ In the Title field, type Price.
▪ In the Description field, type:
This criterion is based on the price attribute of the cars.
▪ In the Objective field, select Minimize. Because the price of each car is already specified in the price attribute, you can use those values by linking this criterion to the price attribute.
6 Click OK.
The Price criterion is listed on the Criteria page.
7 To link the price attribute and the criteria, in the Estimate row, click the Edit Estimate icon .
8 From the list of modules, click Cars.
The Price attribute, which is the only integer attribute in the Cars module, is listed on the page. This page typically lists all the integer attributes of the selected module.
9 Click Price.
On the Price criterion page, the value “Price in the cars module” is in the Estimate field. This value indicates that the link between the attribute and the criterion is set.
You can now compare several car elements on two criteria: design appeal and price. For more information on criteria, see Creating criteria and thresholds.
Lesson checkpoint
In this lesson, you learned how to define criteria and to associate an attribute of a module with a criterion.
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