Requirements Management & Analysis

Analysts report that poor business requirements management accounts for as much as 71 percent of software project failures. The main cause is the gap between:

• What the business team wants
• How the business team communicates this
• What IT understands and delivers

Project Failure Causes

And we all know examples of projects that did not meet their planned result. Many different reasons are mentioned for such a failure:

• The effects of other current projects were not properly taken into account
• The business requirements of other departments were not sufficiently met
• The delivered specifications were not checked against specific testability
• The delivered specifications were not bundled into over time deliverable sets by adequate project phasing
• The delivered specifications were not bundles into functional independent sets

Predictable Projects

All these aspects lead to more difficult predictable projects. And hence, one Euro saved in the early phase of the project leads to multi Euro savings in later phases. Also, if you consider the delivered quality, and the stress of less controllable and mostly over spending projects bring with them, it is very profitable to spend some time on business requirements' management. And check the ROI to make sure that you are satisfied with it!

Release Management

There is another advantage to package specifications in sets that can be implemented over time. Results and therefore benefits are can be consumed earlier, and thus add to a positive cash-flow.

Over time, business priorities tend to change. With a first achieved result, you bought yourself time. Now, you have the possibility to re-evaluate the specifications including their relations with other business priorities, and you have the opportunity to decide the give another project a higher priority, and let this one rest for a while.

Implications

This implies of course, that one set of all your business requirements will not do, but that you need versions, and that each evaluation moment creates a new set of updated earlier specifications.

Summary of Benefits

To summarize all benefits of business requirements' management:

• Better quality project results
• Lower project costs
• Earlier consumption of benefits
• More flexibility
• Less risks

These benefits undoubtedly lead to more successes to celebrate. The benefits of structured requirements gathering are:

• A better channel of communication to the customer during analysis and build phases, for higher levels of customer satisfaction.
• More accurate task and project estimation due to more complete and accurate requirements capture.
• Visibility of high-risk architectural issues earlier in the build phase, allowing you to take preemptive action.
• A much improved ability to adjust for feature modification.
• Enabling the possibility to re-prioritize the project mid-cycle without jeopardizing the time-line.

These guidelines for successful requirements planning projects have been established through numerous projects and with the help of numerous people.

So start now to become more successful in your business changes! Take a look at our best practices and guidelines in requirements planning methodology and also the corresponding business requirements process and content checklist, and discover when and how an excellent business requirements tool can help you!