Requirements Redux

Jiju ‘Jay’ Nair is a Senior Manager with Fannie Mae driving Cloud Transformation and adoption. He is an avid advocate for using innovative project and process management principles for building reliable and sustainable products.

  Business Case   Requirements Management   Scope Management   Strategy  

The businessman had asked for a widget and he got a wicket (I know that this is a wicked joke). However, as project managers we often smile at stories like these as we know that the probability of such a thing actually happening in an IT project is high.

Surveys conducted by the Standish group and OASIG (UK) suggests that poor requirements gathering is a major factor for IT project failure. A combination of poor planning, communication and tracking also contributes to the bleak scenario. As an example, a large financial company that took pride in its project management practices had hired a set of consultants to advise its PMs on the art of requirements gathering. However, the advice fell on deaf ears as the PMs believed that the requirements analysis was the domain of business analysts. While it seemed that their sentiment was justified, IT project portfolio dashboards clearly showed that the major cause for failed projects was the huge gap in effectively fulfilling stakeholder requirements.

Project management principles state that there should be absolute clarity in obtaining the requirements. If the fog of ambiguity clouds the requirements phase, the delivered project will never be accepted by the stakeholders. It is interesting to examine some of the glaring issues in the requirements management process that affected the financial company mentioned at the start …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.