Unnecessary Necessities

 

We fill up forms every now and then. We have forms for new project requests, account creation, change requests, leave applications, and even forms for purchasing toilet paper. Have you ever wondered how much time you have spent in your life filling up forms? A research shows that form-filling costs UK business £104 billion a year with average UK worker spending 37 days in year 2010 carrying out administrative tasks. Ridiculous! Wake up, bureaucrats.

I was invited to a meeting to discuss a new change request process. Half way through the meeting, a colleague of mine raised a comment that the existing change request form is too complicated and takes a lot of time to fill in. When being asked if all those fields in the form are indeed necessary, the host of the meeting replied – “Yes, they are mandatory”. Why do we need so many mandatory fields in a form? After a few more rounds of investigative questioning, we found out that Microsoft Excel was the culprit. It happened that someone at the top wanted a report on the volume and status of change requests to be generated out on a monthly basis. Unfortunately, the data need to be categorized before the sleek charts and pivot tables can be plotted in MS Excel. Here we go. This was the reason why those mandatory fields were added – to provide categorization for the data. What a ‘fantastic’ reason? When grilled further on whether those mandatory fields were ever fully utilized to provide meaningful information, the host simply replied that he was not sure as those fields were added by other people many years back. Great! We felt like the children following the pied piper.

Why are we wasting the bulk of our time on things that we hardly use? Should someone regularly review and weed out those unnecessary necessities from the old stale ‘best practices’? I have seen the same phenomenon occurring time and again in projects especially in requirements gathering. How many of you have come across stakeholders who keep demanding for tons of requirements that hardly add any value to the project? Are these unnecessary ‘nice to have’ requirements eroding your budgets and delaying your projects? Are you using any tools like Kano Model or Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to help you categorize and prioritize your project requirements? Do you have a change review board in your project team? If not, what do you do to ensure that the requirements raised by the stakeholders are properly evaluated and validated before investing more time and money on them?

Gathering requirements is not easy, but the task of weeding out the unnecessary necessities is even more challenging.