Managing Requirements with Common Sense

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.

  Applications Delivery   Information Technology   Requirements Management   Scope Management  

The failure rate of IT projects due to ambiguous or inconsistent stakeholder requirements is three times higher than their success rates. This alarming trend was brought to light through a survey conducted by the IAG consulting group. As part of the same survey, it was found that 68% of the IT companies having a project budget of at least $250,000 experienced project failures mainly due to flawed business or requirements analysis practices. These facts underline organizations’ dire need to establish a robust requirements management process and adopt the tools to support such processes effectively.

From an IT project perspective, a requirement accurately defines the condition or capability to which a system must conform. Requirements can be obtained directly from the user needs or they can be found in contracts, standards or specifications. Spending enough time to gather stakeholder requirements and analyzing them will determine if a project will be successful or not.

Establish the framework
There are many reasons for project failures--a lack of proper planning is definitely one of them. While there are several aspects of a project that need to be planned, creating a requirements management plan should definitely be one of them. This plan would define the requirements management process, the roles team members play and the artifacts that may be produced during…

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