Software product success.
At a recent presentation in Austin by Seilevel about the goals and methods of requirements gathering, a member of the audience asked “What can we do with our requirements to assure innovation?” That’s a tough question with an easy answer – nothing.
What if the question had been “What can we do to prevent innovation?” That’s a better question with a lot of answers.
Why won’t my boss approve my project? I’ve done the math – it’s a good investment. Because it isn’t good enough. We learn the math and rationale behind these decisions in this article.
We’ve talked repeatedly about using ROI to drive prioritization of requirements based upon value. ROI can be used as the basis for prioritization for all decision making.
If we fail to take risk into account, our calculations will certainly be wrong, and we may make a poor decision. When we talk about accounting for risk in this context, we mean that we are accounting for the unlikely, undesired, or unintentional outcomes. We use the term expected value to refer to the risk adjusted approximation of the outcome. In financial circles, this is also called discounting.
The most common mistake people make when calculating ROI is failing to take into account the expected value of the return or the expected value of the cost of a project.
Now that we’ve gathered all these requirements, how do we determine which ones to do first?
The less we know about our client’s business, the more the requirements appear to be equivalent. We’ll talk about three different approaches to prioritizing requirements.
1. Classical. Let stakeholders assign priority to the requirements.
2. Exhaustive. Explore every nuance of prioritization and its application to requirements.
3. Value-based. Let ROI drive the decisions. (hint: this is the best one – scroll down if you’re in a real hurry)
4. [bonus]. A look at how 37signals prioritizes features for their products.
Use cases are a great tool for establishing the scope of a project. They provide a framework for defining what needs to be implemented (if it doesn’t support a use case, we don’t need to implement it). They also set expectations with stakeholders (here’s what you can do with the […]
One of the key points that enables James’ approach is “tight collaboration†between the program manager and the developers. He talks about the miracles that can happen when you have this, as conversations can cause time to miraculously appear in the schedule. And his use of the toaster analogy is spot on.
People who elicit and manage requirements – product managers, business analysts, program managers, and others – also orchestrate and communicate with their clients. In an enterprise software project, the requirements manager (RM from here on out) has to communicate with people across the client organization. To pass along information, gain […]