Operational Requirements

  Requirements Management   ProjectsAtWork  

On development projects, operational issues should be factored into the requirements or you could end up with a product that meets all the business requirements but is too costly to maintain and support in the real world. To avoid this, consider adding a seat at the table for operations to participate in the requirements gathering stage.

Before I bought my house, a neighbor in the construction business gave me a valuable piece of advice: determine if you can afford both the house and the upkeep. And because buying a house that my husband and I could afford to maintain became one of our main requirements, that neighbor accompanied us as we looked at houses and he steered us away from the money pits.

The same is applicable to IT projects.

In order to avoid a project that is too costly to maintain, the operational aspect of a project must be factored into the requirements. And to do this, operations must have a seat at the table. If they aren’t, you could end up with a project that is unable to live in production in a cost-effective and stable way.

Typically, the project owner and the project team focus on building the application and making sure that it works according to specifications. The operational issues of the project are only thought about towards the end of the project, after the application has already been built and the focus has been shifted to …

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