Implementing a requirements management tool within your organization has an impact on all those involved in your IT development projects.
To ensure success, your teams need to be fully prepared:
Explain objectives
The objectives of a requirements management tool are to :
- Putting requirements back at the heart of your development projects;
- Ensure that your development projects meet the needs expressed. Requirements management itself is just one way of achieving this goal;
- Build a centralized, accessible repository whose current versions vs. those implemented in IS can be easily identified;
- Improving the quality of requirements ;
- Quickly and unambiguously identify the impact of regulatory changes or your organization’s needs;
- Reduce the cost of your development projects.
These objectives are cross-functional, and don’t just concern your Business analuysts team, even if theyr are the primary user of the tool.
Explain the benefits
The benefits go far beyond the scope of business analysts’ activities:
- BA: professionalize your teams, save time, reduce the number of bugs of functional origin, increase the quality of work produced;
- Business / legal department: traceability of needs and decisions, regulatory and business requirements that are accessible, clearly identified, formalized and whose validation, during collective reviews, is a real and binding validation;
- Project manager: clearly defined sprint content and progress shared with all players ;
- Technical teams: A source of precise, clear and unambiguous information on the content of current, past and future developments;
- Test teams: clearly defined versions of requirements to be tested, even as they continue to evolve in the repository.
These objectives are cross-functional and do not only concern your team of business analysts, even if they are the primary users of the tool.
Explain the impact
The impact on your teams’ activities is significant:
- BA: less time spent formalizing your needs, but greater expectations of quality, precision and completeness on the part of the other players in your projects;
- Business / legal department: greater involvement in the validation of requirements (carried out during collective reviews);
- Project manager: easier sprint management thanks to precise knowledge of the content of each sprint ;
- Technical teams: more precise and complete content, less time wasted on interpretation and/or feedback with the project owner, enabling them to concentrate on design and development;
- Test teams: the requirements repository becomes the single, centralized source of information for each version of a requirement to be tested.
A requirements management tool is a cross-functional tool that will have a significant impact on the activities of everyone involved in your development projects.
A long-term approach
The construction of a comprehensive, high-quality set of requirements is a long-term process:
- While adoption of the tool is generally very rapid, it will take several years to migrate your traditional IS documentation into a single repository. This migration must be carried out as part of a strategy (this subject will be covered in another article);
- The quest for quality is a major and permanent objective, which needs to be supported and reminded (training, awareness-raising sessions, etc.) on a regular basis.
As you can see, a requirements management tool is much more than just another tool in your portfolio of IT tools for your development teams.
Its adoption requires preparation, including communication of objectives, benefits and impacts, and its implementation is a long-term process.