Requirements & Requirements Management

[Webinar Recap] Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization

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This image portrays a webinar speaker who will lead the topic of Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization.

In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization” – Click HERE to watch it in its entirety.

Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization

Is your organization struggling with costly production failures?

A survey by Engineering.com revealed that a staggering 83% of companies faced production outcome failures — such as significant delays, cost overruns, product defects, compliance gaps, recalls, omitted requirements, and extensive rework — often stemming from inadequate requirements management.

In contrast, implementing standardized requirements management can lead to enhanced consistency, repeatability, predictability, and a distinct competitive advantage.

In this webinar, Matt Mickle – Director, Solutions & Consulting at Jama Software, explores the advantages of establishing, implementing, and enforcing requirements management standards within your organization.

In this session, you will learn:

  • The key benefits of standardizing requirements management across your organization
  • Common challenges encountered during the standardization process
  • How to leverage Jama Connect® to implement best practices and streamline your requirements management standards

BELOW IS AN ABBREVIATED SECTION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT

Matt Mickle: Hello and thank you all for joining today. Perhaps requirements management is a new task for you, or perhaps you have been doing it for many years. Hopefully, I can provide some value for any of those people listening regarding standardizing requirements management within their organization. Personally over the last 10 years working at Jama Software as a consultant and over hundreds of implementations that I’ve worked on with our customers on developing their process and modernizing their requirements elicitation, I have developed a strong bias towards the need for standardization is definitely a crucial area which if correctly developed within an organization, will actually improve the speed of product development rather than slowing it down.

So on the agenda today, we will talk about how standardizing requirements management processes can benefit your organization and also the challenges that organizations commonly face when developing a standardized process. Then we’ll dive into how Jama Connect can make the successful and sustainable implementation of standardized requirements management processes within your organization a reality. Before we get started, let’s make sure that we are aligned on what we mean when we say requirements management.

Requirements management, sometimes called requirements engineering or requirements definition is the process of documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing, and agreeing on requirements, and then of course controlling change in communication to relevant stakeholders. It is a continuous process throughout product development and the process that companies use to take their raw ideas and turn them into detailed requirements. The pillars of requirements management include requirement definition, requirement verification and validation, and requirements change management. The most fundamental aspect of any requirements management activity is the need for communicating effectively.

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Mickle: While requirements are originally elicited within the first step of the product development lifecycle, it is important that we keep in mind that they are part of a bigger picture and that ownership of that bigger picture may vary. For example, the governance of requirements management processes may fall under your organization’s project or portfolio management office and can be controlled centrally or sometimes companies may choose to control that in a project-specific way. Just as there are multiple approaches to the ownership of requirements processes, there is no one-size-fits-all requirements management standard framework, and there are many standards that are proven to work. Examples include those defined in the system engineering body of knowledge or the business analyst body of knowledge or others listed here. I’d like to point out a great quote from Aristotle. “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

I think this really represents the value for considering and taking in from multiple approaches within your organizations in order to drive for successful adaptation of standards. So now that we have level set on our definition of requirements management and have established that ownership and approach can vary from company to company and even from project to project, let’s move on to our main topic. Standardizing requirements management across the organization, a concept that can be entirely agnostic and universally beneficial no matter your product development structure or methodology.

Now there is no argument that requirements management has increased in prominence in the recent years and regardless of industry, it is largely no longer considered a nice to have for development, but rather an absolute necessity. Yet for most implementation details often remain ambiguous and therefore difficult to apply. We can be entirely committed to getting the requirements right with a little consensus on what getting the requirements right actually means. It can be hard to escape the manifestations of the Mobius strip and requirements management such as the statement requirements management is planned in the requirements management plan. This is where standardization arrives to save the day.

The standard becomes our requirements management plan versus being a separate effort for each product or project that detracts from effort that could be focused instead on development. There is a massive evidence demonstrating the benefits of defining, deploying, and enforcing requirements management standards for your organization. Those benefits include providing a framework for efficiency, predictability, repeatability, and a benchmark for improvement, better traceability, mitigation of risk, easier training and onboarding, and the elimination of unnecessary rework. Additionally, standardization allows organizations to leverage a diverse array of resources while maintaining consistent results, and it also provides transparency both in process and in work performed.

Just as the concept of reusing our requirements and leveraging the work that is done already, which is highly appealing, standardization of requirements management processes could be viewed as reusing our processes for managing requirements for repeatability of success. A strong case for standardization is illustrated in the quote, “Quality is free but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.” What you put in is what you get out. Valuable products are a result of high-quality inputs as well as high-quality processes. Even perfect requirements can’t withstand the damaging effects of a poor process. The pressure to reduce development time is only ever-increasing and standardization liberates development teams from worrying about the mechanics of development process and allows them to instead give their full focus to solution development.

Consider the quote from Lee Iacocca, the former CEO of Chrysler. “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” Now imagine a new tech company that is developing a revolutionary product, but everyone is trusted with their own process. This causes teams to work in silos. They develop strong processes but with little alignment. Eventually, their misinterpretation with one another can lead to bugs or the wrong things being developed, causing delays and extensive meetings to try and realign. What they can do is define a standard process for communicating and aligning on the requirements. And with a communication plan and regular alignment meetings, this will them to coordinate more effectively and have the same vision about what they’re building.

Earlier I stated that the most fundamental aspect of requirements management is the need to communicate effectively. If establishing requirements management standards seems like a heavy-handed approach, then just try polling a cross-section of your development team to define the difference between validation and verification, and maybe you’ll reconsider. It is critical that the foundations of your requirements management process are uniformly understood and applied across your organization in order to ensure quality with your final product. Now you might be wondering if the case for standardization is so strong, then why isn’t everyone doing it? This is a fair question and the rationale is likely due to previous challenges they have faced or perceived challenges. So let’s take a few minutes to explore what challenges teams may face in their efforts for standardization.

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Mickle: One common challenge is that we need to correct the misconception that standardization stifles creativity and response time. Standardization of requirements management is about removing the things that get in the way of your work rather than adding more work to your work. Other common misconceptions that face a standardization effort are that it’s too time-consuming or it’s too costly to implement or that it will disrupt development and progress. Given the overwhelming statistical correlation between poor requirements and project failure, it’s pretty hard to bear these arguments too much weight. The basic thought is that if you can make time to fix your problems, then you can definitely make time to plan so that those problems don’t occur.

Okay, so now we have discussed some of the benefits and the perceived challenges to a standardization of a requirements management approach. Let’s take a minute to reconsider how to move forward. The first step is the definition of a process framework. That process framework may include policies and standards, processes, procedures, training and tools, and please note that there’s a surprising amount of debate over the definitions for the hierarchy between the terms listed on this slide.

My intent is to illustrate the importance of establishing the framework not to prescribe the individual elements or their order. Over the past several years, Jama Software has developed comprehensive solution offerings in many industries. Those include a process, framework, definition, or the different verticals. We are constantly working on improving those frameworks as the industry changes, as new standards and maturity models are introduced, and as we learn from our customers and industry experts that we work very closely with.

Here is an example just to give you an idea of what a concept of a process framework would look like. Basically taking the foundations and breaking them into standards or policies and then into processes and supporting procedures. Here are some additional supporting elements that are extremely critical and must be taken into consideration. People, put the necessary resources in place to properly apply requirements management and recognize and develop the skills needed for the functions needed. Processes, it’s important to standardize and formalize processes at the project and product levels in order to ensure good requirements management practices are consistently applied.

WATCH THIS WEBINAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Standardizing Requirements Management Across the Organization

Matt Mickle
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