One of the biggest obstacles to any successful project is a lack of robust, value driven Business Requirements. Business requirements provide a benchmark of what will be delivered in your project and allow all stakeholders to have a clear view on what success looks like. The Project Management Institute states here that 3 of the 9 reasons projects fail are related to business requirements. That is why it is important to get your business requirements right!
What causes these failures:
Some of the causes of these failures come from not prioritising requirements and businesses end up with:
- Trying to fit legacy requirements into a new solution
- Taking cookie cutter template requirements without customising for their business
- Too many requirements that will cause project cost overruns and delays
- Not asking all the key stakeholders for their input
How do you get business requirements right?
Start out by guiding your internal stakeholders towards requirements and not solutions. Why is what you are asking for important to staff, customers and/or the organisation Shift the conversation from technologies or processes to capabilities.
Some great questions I like to use are:
- How would you do this if you had to start from scratch and anything was possible?
- What are other ways you can solve this problem?
- What is the craziest way you could solve this problem?
- What advice would those at the front line give you to solve this?
- How has the top company in our industry solved this problem?
Who should be involved?
Make sure you ask the right people, especially those with customer insight. I was once told an anecdote about an organisation that was having significant traffic problems into and out of their main factory. There were up to 1-hour delays to complete the last 3 miles of the journey.
The organisation hired in external consultants to review the costs of the delays, the causes of the traffic and provide options to resolve it. These options included adding additional lanes to the road and staggering the shifts of the factory workers, however, all these options had impacts on capital outlay or reduced factory output.
It was after millions of dollars had been spent and no viable solution was in place that the company’s receptionists overheard some of the executives talking about the issue. She immediately offered a solution “why don’t you tell suppliers they can’t make deliveries between 8 to 10 and 4 to 6?” The factory had a steady stream of trucks delivering supplies at the same time as staff arriving and leaving the factory. This rather simple, cost-free, change resulted in a reduction of average travel times from 60 to 15 minutes. If only they asked the receptionist at the start!
Ensure you work with a cross-section of marketing, product, finance and operations to maximise success for your transformation.
Focussing on getting your business requirements right for your business will help your business avoid 33% of the most common causes of project failures.
Do these challenges with business requirement sound familiar? Want expert advice on how to solve this?
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