Requirements
Simple Requirements Gathering Principles for Exploding Your Success
How important are requirements?
Requirements dictate the project and how the business is run. Therefore, we must be careful when gathering customer requirements. Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This is profound in a lot of ways. We translate this requirement as the customer wants to travel faster. The horse was simply the best known method at that time. When gathering requirements we must understand the needs and wants before we focus on the technology or the means. Henry Ford developed a way to mass market the automobile to help the masses go faster, but then they wanted more features. When we satisfy a need the wants move up in priority. Their want becomes your need if you want to retain their business. Someone else is always eager to cater to their wants if you are not.
Simple Principles for Exploding Your Success
Apply the 80/20 rule to achieve breakthroughs regularly. I am a strong believer in the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. In any requirements gathering activity, just a few factors are responsible for the majority of success or failure. For example, just 20% of the issues consume 80% of the time; 20% of your daily activities generate 80% of your success; and so on. This certainly applies to the factors governing success gathering requirements. Consequently, you don't need to master hundreds of rules and secrets. The right few will bring you success. Learn the right few and you may well become a master of business analysis. Achievement is the key to happiness and you will achieve by mastering the vital few, while others squander their time on the trivial many.
Keep it Simple
The vast majority of business analysts spend most of their days dreaming up ways to make things more complicated and mysterious, which is why their projects are almost always delayed and over budget. A tiny handful of master business analysts know that simplicity is the secret of successful projects. Never make your models more complicated than your requirements. Always join your requirements and your models together, so that you never promote one without the other. There is no more powerful or consistent way to garner positive response. Surround your requirements with clear, illustrative models and watch your response skyrocket.
The Secret of Hidden Data
The secret of hidden data is a little-known secret for instantly accelerating your success in requirements gathering or any other activity in life. This secret is so powerful, it can work a profound change in every area of your life, including requirements gathering. The secret is amazingly simple. It will empower you to open your eyes and see the world in a new way. It will let you uncover many of life's treasures hiding in plain sight, and can be used to obtain anything you desire far more easily. I call it the secret of hidden data. Imagine that you and I are sitting in a conference room looking at a huge project proposal or business case. I say to you, "Business Analyst, look around this project. Take a good look and then close your eyes." Then I ask, "Business Analyst, how many requirements did you notice?" You think for a moment and reply, "Why, I really didn't notice any. I was looking at the project." As I thought, when it came to noticing requirements, your eyes were wide open but you were still asleep. Likewise, your team is also blind to requirements until you point them out. Scan the project again, but this time, look for the requirements. You do so and suddenly notice more requirements than you can count. Right away, you have just experienced a quantum leap in your ability to identify requirements.
Why is this such a powerful secret for mastering requirements gathering or anything else in life? Simple: For the words, requirements, substitute something else like opportunity, new approach, risk, threats, weaknesses, efficiencies, waste, etc. You won't likely stumble across any of these things by going through life staring blankly at the projects. But you will spot them unfailingly once you look purposely, exclusively, and persistently for each. Awareness is made possible by purpose. Seek and ye shall find, but it works only when you seek for one thing persistently.
The secret of the hidden data takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master, because we all want many things at once. We are not only looking for requirements but the entire solution and technology simultaneously. But as you saw in the project of your mind, life reveals opportunities one at a time. To find a requirement, you must look for requirements and only requirements, and keep looking for a requirement until you find one. Then you can move on to technology and other things.
The Cost of Avoiding Requirements
- Issues that are discovered during design, coding, or testing costs far more than issues addressed during analysis.
- Costs are further increased by changes to requirements during maintenance and enhancement activities.
- Reportedly, an average of 77% of software development project budgets is attributed to missing or incomplete requirements documentation.
