Prioritization with ROI is generally thought of as a quantitative analysis. For hard ROI, that is true. For soft ROI, it is anything but true. You have to make a prediction of the utility of the requirement or feature. That predicted utility is based on our expected utility, which is based on your past experiences. Your past experiences are reflected in remembered utility, which is a function of experienced utility. How can you know with certainty, and use that to prioritize requirements or features?
How To Measure Costs When Calculating ROI
At a high level, it is easy to describe ROI – the return on the investment. But how do we measure the investment? There’s a problem when we have to go to the next level. Some costs are obviously incurred as part of our actions, and some costs happen even if we don’t take the action. We have to allocate those costs across all our actions or we won’t have an accurate reflection of our investment. Without an accurate model of our investment, we can’t calculate the return on our investment.