It’s well known that a large number of projects fail in some way or another. They are either cancelled prematurely, delivered late, cost too much, or they don’t deliver the expected benefits. It’s often this last reason that’s the worst one. Depending on the size of the overrun to budget or schedule, the organisation may be able to absorb it and live with it. But if the project doesn’t deliver the expected benefits, the rationale for undertaking the  project is at stake.  The dis-benefits may even be so significant that the delivery does more harm than good and has to be rolled back.
 
Have a look at the cartoon below. Many of us have seen it before but we still seem to fall into the trap. We struggle to deliver what the customer wants and fail to give them what they really need.

Many project teams find it challenging to decipher what the customers’ requirements are. And with good reason. Customers and end users aren’t normally trained in conveying what they want, let alone what they need.  More likely, they are trained to do an excellent job on the line in a “business as usual” capacity rather than in a change management capacity. 

But as illustrated in the above cartoon, the biggest challenge is not necessarily understanding and delivering what our customers want but rather what they really need. The goal of any project is to solve the root cause of the customer’s problem in an elegant, cost-effective and usable manner – and to provide a solution which is far superior to what they have today. Our projects have to add the maximum amount of value; something which is only possible if we look beyond our customers’immediate requirements and fully understand their pain points and how they translate to tangible and measurable business benefits. We have to get away from the mentality of delivering to a user specification without validating it or questioning it.

On our road to improving project execution and deliver real value to our clients, we must avoid the following pitfalls:

1. Lack of business awareness
One of the biggest mistakes we make when delivering what our customer’s want rather than need is that we fail to understand the business context of our projects. Project mangers don’t study their client’s core business processes or question the project’s business case. They don’t have a good view of the project’s real objectives and how they can help their customer to grow their business, improve productivity, reduce cost, comply with rules and regulation, improve safety, or whatever the ultimate business benefits are. We need to get better at understanding what our customers and end users are trying to do on a daily basis so that we can help them do it even better.

2. Lack of thoroughness
When working to deliver a product, which genuinely will help our clients to do a better job, we need to understand in detail what the business processes are that we need to emulate or improve. Project teams often make the mistake of not going into enough detail with their analysis. Their descriptions become too generic, contain assumptions or genuinely don’t consider corner cases or end-to-end processes. To identify and map out the client’s needs all situations must to be thought through and analysed. Thorough analysis, of course, requires a good understanding of the business context which brings us back to the first point above.
 
3. Dismissing the need for a business analyst
Some organisations don’t see the value of good quality business analysts and therefore refrain from hiring them. They either expect the project manager or team leads to identify and gather the requirements, or they rely on the customer to deliver them. The problem is that these groups are unlikely to be adequately trained (or have the time) to analyse, understand and put forward the most suited requirements. Good business analysts with in depth domain knowledge should work alongside the project manager and end users to help explore what it is that needs to be delivered so that the clients’ needs can be met and possibly even exceeded. 
 
4. Not consulting the end users 
Leaving requirements gathering solely to the customer and end users can be dangerous, but not consulting them enough is equally dangerous. We sometimes assume that we know more about our clients’ needs than we really do, and that leads us to developing a product in isolation without regularly checking back with them. Gathering requirements and translating them into the best possible solution is a dynamic process which should be explored and refined through a feedback loop of prototyping, demos and walkthroughs with the end users. This feedback is an excellent way of eliciting the user’s real needs. 
 
5. Valuing speed of delivery over quality
When organisations and teams are too focused on delivering a speedy solution at low cost, it can be at the expense of quality. What sometimes happens is that change requests aren’t being allowed, proper analysis and design is not carried out, prototyping and demonstrations are omitted and testing is compromised. The project becomes a tick boxing exercise rather than ensuring that a quality product is being delivered. Elegant solutions which provide the customer with real benefit and ingenious design require time, effort, and the right kind of skill. 

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As a project manager, you may be in a situation where the customer
delivers the requirements to you in a neat and structured way ready for the team to estimate and deliver a solution. However, in many cases it is up to the project team to work with the customer and users to extract, analyse and
document what the requirements are. In that situation you may want to use the following tips: 

Agree the approach to managing requirements. First of all, agree with your team, customer and end users what the process will be for gathering, documenting and controlling requirements and who will be responsible for each part of the process. Formally capture the steps, tools and roles and responsibilities in a requirements management plan and get it signed off by the stakeholders.

Engage the right people. Make sure you talk to the end users and senior stakeholders who have the actual authority to sign off on requirements and who will ultimately be using the end product. They can tell you what they want and what they expect from the product you are building.

Be proactive. Do not sit back and wait for the customer to deliver a detailed, concise and well  structured requirements document. In most cases you need to be proactive and work with the stakeholders and end users to help them structure and articulate their needs. 

Organize a workshop.  Workshops are a very powerful technique for gathering requirements. Set up an initial workshop to uncover the vision and high level requirements. Involve all major stakeholders and make it last for several days if necessary. 
 
Describe the product vision. Take a top down view and capture the essence of the envisaged product to be developed. Determine the objectives, needs, wants, limitations and constraints. Document the vision and get the customer to sign it off.

Identify the users. Identify all the users who in one way or another will be using and interacting with the end product. Each user group is likely to have unique requirements to the product.

Specify what is out of scope. Specifically focus on and write down items that are out of scope. Make it as explicit as possible and clearly draw up the boundaries between what you will and what you will not deliver.

Analyze the problem. Agree with the senior stakeholders what the overall problem is that your product is there to resolve. Drill down and identify the problems behind the problem. Prioritize them and document them. 

Break the requirements down. Break the high level requirements and products down into its constituent parts. Set up workshops in turn which focus on specific parts or components of the product and involve the necessary stakeholders.  

Ask open questions. Engage all user groups, interview them and ask open questions about what they want from a specific component, product or sub-product. Ask them what the product will enable them to do and how they will be interacting with it. Focus on their needs and problems and how they will determine if the product works according to their specifications.

Be creative. Use a variety of techniques in addition to workshops such as, interviewing, storyboarding, brainstorming, role playing, and prototyping.

Verify the requirements. Play back your understanding of the requirements to the stakeholders to ensure they have been correctly captured and understood. Illustrate or demonstrate it in whichever way is the most effective and ensure the requirements get formally signed off.

Capture non-functional requirements. Capture all non-functional requirements which the users may not have thought of. This includes requirements around maintainability, scalability and performance. Seek to understand what will happen after the project completes and which requirements relate to the long term usability of the solution. 

Organize the requirements. Depending on the size of the project you may not be able to define the requirements in one single document. Maintain multiple requirements sets; one for each of the products and sub-product you have identified.   

Incorporate acceptance criteria and test cases. As you gather and document the requirements, simultaneously document how each product or requirement will be tested and what its acceptance criteria are. 

Use a requirements traceability matrix. Keep track of all requirements and their associated test cases in a requirements traceability matrix. It helps you carry out completeness checks and track the progression of each requirement. Get the matrix signed off so that it serves as a baseline scope document against which you can track and control changes.  On the RESOURCES page you will be able to download a requirements traceability matrix template.
 

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