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MoSCoW forces a buying organisation to separate genuine requirements from preferences before approaching the market. Requirements are sorted into Must have, Should have, Could have and Will not have this time. Only the Must have items can disqualify a vendor, which prevents a long undifferentiated wish list from deciding the outcome by accident.
What does MoSCoW stand for?
Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have this time, written out on this page as Will not have. The lowercase letters are filler. The method comes from the DSDM framework maintained by the Agile Business Consortium and is also written as MoSCoW prioritization.
The framework that defines MoSCoW also sets a ceiling on it. The Agile Business Consortium, which maintains the DSDM Project Framework where the technique originated, states that a timebox should carry no more than 60 per cent Must Have effort, with typically around 20 per cent held as Could Have contingency. The framework is explicit that “levels of Must Have effort above 60% introduce a risk of failure”. A requirements list where most items are marked mandatory has already crossed that line before the market sees it.
Why does separating must have from nice to have matter in procurement?
An unsorted requirements list treats every line as equally binding, so vendors are scored against items nobody would actually reject them for. Sorting first means the shortlist is decided by the small number of things that genuinely matter, and the remaining criteria differentiate rather than disqualify.
The Will not have category does quiet work. Writing down what is deliberately out of scope stops it returning halfway through as an urgent new requirement.
How is MoSCoW applied to a vendor evaluation?
Agree the categories with stakeholders before issuing anything to market. Must have items become pass or fail gates. Should have and Could have items become weighted scoring criteria. Will not have items are recorded explicitly so they do not reappear mid-process as new scope.
How can you tell if a specification has too many Must haves?
Apply the DSDM ceiling to the requirements list itself. If Must have carries more than 60 per cent of the scored weight or estimated delivery effort, the specification is probably describing a product rather than a need. Every extra mandatory item removes suppliers, and a long enough list leaves only the incumbent or the vendor whose datasheet it was copied from.
One question sorts most of them: would the organisation genuinely reject an otherwise suitable supplier over this item? If the honest answer is no, it belongs in Should have, where it still counts in the scoring without shrinking the market.
Sources
- MoSCoW Prioritisation, DSDM Project Framework Handbook, Agile Business Consortium. The canonical definition of Must, Should, Could and Won’t Have, and the 60 per cent effort ceiling.
- Commonwealth Procurement Rules, Australian Government Department of Finance. Value for money as the core procurement principle.
Where to read more
See the enterprise technology RFP template and MoSCoW framework, guided vendor evaluations, and what is strategic sourcing.
