The Best Way to Improve ROI is With Good Requirements
Here’s some leverage to use on the pointy-haired boss.
An article at IBM titled Calculating your return on investment from more effective requirements management throws out some stats from the Standish Group:
- 31% of all software projects are canceled before completed ($81 billion waste)
- 53% of projects will cost 189% of estimates
- 9% on time and on budget (large companies)
- 16% on time and on budget (small companies)
More leverage: Why we should invest in requirements management
I also really like the quote from the abstract (their emphasis):
“There is strong evidence to suggest that reducing requirements errors may be the single most effective action application developers can take to improve project outcomes and assist us in our goal of delivering quality software, on time and on budget .”
One ROI benefit of good requirements is being able to work on the most important stuff first.
The top 3 reasons for project failures identified in their poll:
- Lack of user input
- Incomplete requirements
- Requirements churn
(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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January 20th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
[...] Cote’ suggests that we need a single person/team that “does it all”, flattening the hierarchy. Several people commented on a post here about CRUD requirements, and the discussion touches on a similar issue- drawing the line between requirements and design. Some of those folks came to the same conclusion. And I agree, when we can find supermen who can write code that solves valuable problems (which they identify), we can have great software. When we have to collaborate as a team of specialists, we need to include requirements documentation to get the best return on our investments. [...]
January 30th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Related to this topic, here are links to two simple ROI Calculators that help users identify the impact of poor and missing requirments on ‘project re-work’ and in ‘project delays’.
http://www.irise.com/calculators/calc_rework.shtml
http://www.irise.com/calculators/calc_delays.shtml
Additional information can be found at http://www.irise.com
January 30th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
[...] We want our projects to succeed. We believe that successful projects will occasionally lead to repeat business, and failed projects will cause us to lose long term clients by weakening our relationships. We also believe this will differentiate us from our competitors. [...]