Requirements - Business Managers as Beneficiaries

"Customer involvement is the most critical contributor to software quality". Karl Weigers – Author, Software Requirements)

Benefits of Capiro’s Requirements Oriented Approach to Projects

• Focus on solving business problems. IT is the enabler. The business is the starting point.
• Creation of an environment in which flexible, adaptable solutions can be developed.
• Achieve true business agility.
• Get things right first time - rework costs you time and money.
• Realise solutions that promote commercial interests.
• A clear audit trail from business problem to business solution - nothing essential lost, nothing unnecessary added.
• Efficient involvement of all relevant business people - minimises chances of misunderstanding.
• Realise benefits by getting usable products into the hands of the business as quickly as possible.

Return on Investment in Requirements

An investment in an efficient and flexible requirements process should be expected to hit the bottom line directly in terms of quicker time to market, reduction of wasted effort and the capability of putting the right products in the hands of the right people whilst minimising time, cost and risk.

Management Training Sessions

Capiro offers a training session Requirements: The Management Perspective , typically lasting between three hours and one day depending on need, exploring the potential return on an investment in requirements and describing how to plan strategically and tactically for a high performance requirements process.

 If you would like to know more about how Capiro can help you to improve your requirements processes, please contact us.

A Detailed Discussion

Requirements engineering is about maximising project ROI by contributing significantly to the successful delivery of optimal solutions to real business problems whilst helping to minimise cost, time and risk.

You are paying for the development of a product and someone needs to decide just what that product will be. That someone has to understand the underlying business problem. That someone is you. If you don’t do it, the developers will and you will end up paying for their assumptions; you’d better hope that they understand the business as well as you do.

You have expectations in terms of functionality, quality, delivery dates, development costs and ongoing operating costs. Your business case is predicated on all of these being achieved. Failure of any one of them reduces benefits, possibly to the point of non profitability.

An improvement in your company’s requirements process can be seen directly on the bottom line in benefits and savings.

The savings come from reduced development times due to increased clarity on what is really needed, elimination (or significant reduction) of the need for expensive rework and reduced operating costs resulting from an effective partnership of business and development.

The benefits come from solving real business problems in the quickest possible timescales. It is a well established fact that most errors in a software system appear during requirements. Developers are pretty good at delivering what they are told is required. Delays are caused by wrong, incomplete, ambiguous, conflicting and missing requirements. Obviously there are other sources of problem during the requirements 'stage', e.g. issues of communication and private agendas, but many of these can also be attacked by using a rigourous requirements process.

A return on an investment in requirements improvement can be significant. Capiro consultants can undertake a study of your current processes, identify what is required and create a business case to back up the recommendations.

For more information, please contact us.