Optimize Requirements Gathering to Effectively Serve the Business
Poor requirements are the number one reason that projects fail – take a strategic approach to optimizing requirements gathering in order to give the business what it needs.
- Poor requirements are the number one reason that projects fail. Requirements gathering and management has been an ongoing bother for IT professionals for decades.
- If proper due diligence for requirements gathering is not conducted, then the applications that IT is deploying won’t meet business objectives, and will fail to deliver adequate business value.
- Inaccurate requirements definition can lead to significant amounts of project rework and hurt the organization’s financial performance. It will also create significant damage to the working relationship between IT and the business.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- To avoid making makeshift solutions, an organization needs to gather requirements with the desired future state in mind.
- Creating a unified set of standard operating procedures is essential for effectively gathering requirements, but many organizations fail to do it.
- Centralizing governance of requirements processes with a Requirements Gathering Steering Committee or Requirements Gathering Center of Excellence can bring greater uniformity and cohesion when gathering requirements across projects.
Impact and Result
- Enhanced requirements analysis will lead to tangible reductions in cycle time and reduced project overhead.
- An improvement in requirements analysis will strengthen the relationship between business and IT, as more and more applications satisfy stakeholder needs.
- More importantly, the applications delivered by IT will meet all of the “must have” and at least some of the “nice to have” requirements, allowing end users to successfully execute their day-to-day responsibilities.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 1-phase advisory process. You'll receive 7 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
- Call 1: Is requirements gathering optimization right for you?
Discuss the challenges, benefits, and costs of requirements gathering optimization, as well as the resources required for optimization. Finally, determine if your organization is ready to proceed with optimizing a requirements gathering process at this time.
- Call 2: Determine your target and current states for requirements gathering
Review the results of the Requirements Management Target State Assessment and Current State Assessment. Discuss elements of effective requirements management, mapping the requirements gathering process, and criteria of good requirements. Also discuss the root cause of any performance gaps and develop a strategy to bridge the target and current state.
- Call 3: Plan for requirements gathering
Discuss the high-level structure of your new Standard Operating Procedure guide and determine best practices for governance and technology strategy. Review your current efforts in Info-Tech’s Standard Operating Procedures for Requirements Elicitation, Analysis, and Validation template.
- Call 4: Elicit requirements
Determine which requirements elicitation techniques you should include in your SOP guide and discuss an action plan for how each elicitation technique should be conducted (for example, best practices for joint development sessions).
- Call 5: Analyze requirements
Create post-elicitation SOPs that focus on the prudent categorization and prioritization of requirements. This call will also help you identify assumptions and constraints that are inherent to your requirements gathering process, and provide guidance for how these constraints impact analysis (as well as elicitation).
- Call 6: Assess and validate requirements
Build a strategy for stakeholder communication and feedback, and make your business analysts (BAs) achieve a basic understanding regarding how to involve project sponsors and key stakeholders during validation and sign-off sessions.
- Call 7: Manage, communicate, and test requirements
Discuss how to best communicate with stakeholders throughout the requirements gathering process, as well as how to create traceability between requirements and software testing (i.e. UAT) methodologies.
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