“Why?” The question is our inspiration and our muse. “Why?” is the justification for our requirements. The key to identifying “What?” and “When?”, which lead to “How?” and “How Much?” But there is another use for “Why?” – communication of intent (with stakeholders and implementers). Requirements documents are artifacts, but they are also dynamic documents. By documenting “Why?” a requirement is a requirement, we make it easier for future readers to understand.
Polls / Product Management
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Pragmatic Marketing 2006 Survey
The polls are open! Go to their announcement to take the annual Product Management and Marketing Survey! Then check our our post for links to previous survey results and trends.
Administrivia
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New Web Advertising Network – Performancing Partners
If you sell products or services that Tyner Blain readers would want, or have your own blog and want higher quality ads check this out. Tyner Blain has joined a new ad network that should help us provide better ads for our readers. We’re really excited about the network, as the features seem to very effectively address the goals of both advertisers and publishers (bloggers). Regular readers – feel free to skip this one, see you tomorrow at our regularly scheduled time.
Marketing
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Meaningless Marketing Messages
Web Ink Now has a great article and analysis of the gobbledegook that passes for marketing messages. They’ve done an analysis of over 50,000 articles during the first nine months of 2006. Not only have they identified many of the most ridiculous terms, they’ve ranked them (or stack-ranked them, as a former employer would say) based on frequency.
Business Analysis / Requirements / Requirements gathering / ROI
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Don’t Prevent My Success
Finding the right balance when defining requirements can be hard. On one side, we want to avoid an inadequate system – “Don’t prevent my success by excluding features I might want”. On the other side, we want to avoid cost-overruns, delayed schedules, and negative-ROI features. This can be a hard line to walk.
Business Process Modeling / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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Business Rules And Requirements
What is the difference between a business rule and a business requirement? Does the difference matter? A business requirement is something that is multi-customer, and a business rule represents a single customer’s approach to meeting that requirement. Product managers and analysts care about both, but product managers emphasize requirements, and analysts focus more on rules.
Business Analysis / Requirements / Requirements gathering
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How Many People for Requirements Elicitation?
How many people should be involved in requirements elicitation? A question from one of our readers via email. Hi Scott, in the last months I faced the issue of managing the requirement elicitation phase in an Identity Management project. I have a very simple question. In your opinion how many […]
Requirements / Requirements gathering
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Nice To Have
Gathering requirements isn’t like asking kids what they want for their birthday. We aren’t giving our customers carte blanche, we are trying to identify the valuable requirements – things that solve problems and achieve value in a significant way. Needs and Wants Our customers usually know what they want. There’s […]