WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT? Effective Requirements Reduce Project Failures Writing requirements is one of the core competencies for anyone in an organization responsible for defining future Information Technology (IT) applications. However, nearly every independently executed root-cause analysis of IT project problems and failures in the past half-century have identified “misunderstood or incomplete requirements” as the primary cause. This has made writing requirements the bane of many projects. The real problem is the subtle differences between “understanding” someone else’s requirement and “sharing a common understanding” with the author. “How to Write Effective Requirements for IT – Simply Put!” gives you a set of 4 simple rules that will make your requirement statements more easily understood by all target audiences. The focus is to increase the “common understanding” between the author of a requirement and the solution providers (e.g., in-house or outsourced IT designers, developers, analysts, and vendors). The rules we present in this book will reduce the failure rate of projects suffering from poor requirements. Regardless of your job title or role, if you are tasked with communicating your future needs to others, this book is for you. How to Get the Most out of this Book? To maximize the learning effect, you will have optional, online exercises to assess your understanding of each presented technique. Chapter titles prefaced with the phrase “Exercise” contain a link to a web-based exercise that we have prepared to give you an opportunity to try the presented technique yourself. These exercises are optional and they do not “test” your knowledge in the conventional sense. Their purpose is to demonstrate the use of the technique more real-life than our explanations can supply. You need Internet access to perform the exercises. We hope you enjoy them and that they make it easier for you to apply the techniques in real life. Specifically, this eWorkbook will give you techniques to: - Express business and stakeholder requirements in simple, complete sentences - Write requirements that focus on the business need - Test the relevance of each requirement to ensure that it is in scope for your project - Translate business needs and wants into requirements as the primary tool for defining a future solution and setting the stage for testing - Create and maintain a question file to reduce the impact of incorrect assumptions - Minimize the risk of scope creep caused by missed requirements - Ensure that your requirements can be easily understood by all target audiences - Confirm that each audience shares a mutual understanding of the requirements - Isolate and address ambiguous words and phrases in requirements. - Use our Peer Perception technique to find words and phrases that can lead to misunderstandings. - Reduce the ambiguity of a statement by adding context and using standard terms and phrases TOM AND ANGELA’S (the authors) STORY Like all good IT stories, theirs started on a project many years ago. Tom was the super techie, Angela the super SME. They fought their way through the 3-year development of a new policy maintenance system for an insurance company. They vehemently disagreed on many aspects, but in the process discovered a fundamental truth about IT projects. The business community (Angela) should decide on the business needs while the technical team’s (Tom)’s job was to make the technology deliver what the business needed. Talk about a revolutionary idea! All that was left was learning how to communicate with each other without bloodshed to make the project a resounding success. Mission accomplished. They decided this epiphany was so important that the world needed to know about it. As a result, they made it their mission (and their passion) to share this ground-breaking concept with the rest of the world. To achieve that lofty goal, they married and began the mission that still defines their life. After over 30 years of living and working together 24x7x365, they are still wildly enthusiastic about helping the victims of technology learn how to ask for and get the digital (IT) solutions they need to do their jobs better. More importantly, they are more enthusiastically in love with each other than ever before!