Establishing a successful business today involves undertaking projects to introduce innovation and achieve competitive advantage and differentiation. The Standish Group, a primary research advisory group reports that less than a third of IT projects were completed on time and on budget last year. For SMBs delivering successful projects is a major challenge. Wrike, the collaborative work management company says barely half IT project managers have any certification. That is quite often the case for small and medium size businesses. One key to meeting this challenge is to begin projects with a robust requirements gathering plan and process. Time spent gathering requirements can pay major dividends through the life cycle of the project. A multi-track approach to gathering requirements helps unearth hidden and hard to identify needs.
Here are eight techniques to use to identify requirements for your projects.
1 – Interviews – with a broad spectrum of stakeholders
2 – Questionnaires – carefully chosen, probing questions that allow respondents to reflect and put their thoughts in writing.
3 – Workshops – that will surface divergent opinions and contrasting views.
4 – User observation – ideally record the actions and activities that really take place during a process, look for artifacts posted in cubicles, keyboards, etc.
5 – Brainstorming – surface “what if” and blue-sky ideas that help break out of the current state context and consider new visionary ideas.
6 – Role playing – have people play different roles to understand how different parts of the system will need to work to support the integrated process.
7 – Use cases and scenarios – can be used to validate the envisioned process and identify exceptions and boundary cases that need to be considered.
8 – Prototyping – helps reverse engineer the requirements by identifying “I don’t know what I want but I don’t what that” features.
IT Ally™ has the resources and methodologies to help with requirement gathering and other critical phases of your IT project.
[This article was originally published on itallyllc.com.]
