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You go to the company president requesting $500,000 for a project and they say, “Sure. No problem and please do not bother me with details such as why you need it.”
Blind approval as described above is not likely to happen. There may or may not be a formal cost benefit analysis completed. It is after a project is approved that more information about the project is detailed in the requirements.
Skip the Requirement Phase
What about skipping the requirements phase? Requirements can take a lot of time to put together, thus adding cost. Why not be Agile and get rid of this initial requirements phase of the project and jump right into coding. Shape the system as it is being developed. This will reduce time and cost.
Do Requirements Matter?
What is the purpose of requirements? There are two major reasons to have requirements:
- Define the business needs
- Identify what is to be built (A.K.A. project scope)
Can someone just start coding the new system when the business need has not been defined? How will they know what is to be built? If the project is small, then yes they can. Someone from the business can verbally communicate what needs built and a developer can build it. How does this work on a large project?
The larger the project, the more difficult and more risk the project will take on when skipping the initial requirements phase. A project might achieve savings early on by skipping the requirements phase, but that savings is now going to be spent in excess of the early savings, due to loss of potential revenue and developing features which were missed or need changed.
How Much Do Requirements Matter
According to PMI’s Pulse of the Profession In-Depth Report
- The #2 most cited reason projects fail is due to poor requirements management
- Inaccurate requirements gathering remained a primary cause of project failure (37 percent) in 2014
- For projects which do not fail, 4% of project budget is wasted due to poor requirements
According to IAG ‘s 2009 Business Analysis Benchmark Report
- 74 percent of companies reported having a low level of requirements management maturity
- These companies achieved their business objectives 54 percent of the time, while taking 35 percent longer to deliver their results.
If you are going Agile and thinking of going lite on requirements, perhaps the statistics above are worth noting. You may want to invest more time in quality requirements. For additional information on Requirements visit Requirements Engineering Magazine






