New Requirements? No, Weak BA!

Dmitri is a User Experience (UX) and Interaction Designer in Toronto.

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Topics: Requirements Management, Scope Management, Stakeholder Management

Are you still blaming users for new requirements? We're getting an overwhelming amount of feedback about common requirements trouble—from projects of all sizes, across all industries. The troubles include confusion around the scope and direction, lack of project alignment with business needs, getting stalled looking for perfection, trying to anticipate business needs instead of getting the facts, and many more.

Why is this all happening? Is it because of the lack of discipline among requirements holders, who just keep on asking for different things—often late in our projects—throwing a monkey wrench into our schedules and budgets?

Let's look at stakeholder management, one of the top time and energy drains for a lot of PMs.

Dealing with difficult people
Why are we seeing constant issues with “difficult” people? Why do they keep on asking for changes and new functionality?

Except for a very few cases of anti-social behavior, most business people are not asking for changes just because they like to disrupt projects. They do so because in a lack of robust processes for collecting requirements, critical realizations are often missed and later get discovered as “new” requirements.

If you're like most organizations out there right now, chances are that your stakeholders too have very little faith in your …

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