You need not been so technically skilled to be able to see how many project fail due to requirements.  We provide a brief list of the failings below: Requirements control Insufficient time Did not include the sponsor or customer Late delivery of requirements Requirements traceability We will not write any more on requirements control that […]

The initial product requirements provide the product baseline. Our project planning will be focused upon delivering meeting these requirements. In a phased development process, we will prioritize the requirements (shown earlier) and deliver iterations.  This staged delivery allows us to gain additional insight into the product.  We may learn things that necessitate changes to the […]

This may sound difficult, but there are some rules for good requirements.  According to the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE http://www.incose.org/chicagoland/docs/Writing%20Effective%20Requirements.pdf), requirements should have the attributes below (similarly can be found at IEEE): Necessary –  driven by the objective of the project and business Verifiable – ability to objectively confirmed that the requirement is […]

So how do we ensure we get meaningful requirements? We have a number of ways to understand our objective and learning about the Interviews customer clinics Simulation Digital mock ups Prototype physical mock ups Instrumentation Other information gathering (standards, regulations, etc.) We start with interviews of customers, stakeholders and project sponsors. Interviews also include customer […]

Requirements are fundamental to project success as the scope definition.  Additionally, there are dependencies that impact the ability to produce suitable requirements.  A few of those things are: Well defined scope of the work Sponsor and customer involvement Capability of the requirements authors Prioritized functions or abilities The needs or objectives of the customers or […]

“Scaffolding” is a term often used in education, but in our experience, rarely followed to a significant extent. Scaffolding allows us to grow a student in capability by starting easily and providing progressively more intricate and involved exercises. This approach actualizes Lev Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development. When training clients, we must […]

Consider a rather large project that like so many projects had some difficulties. The project team had a major component (subsystem) delivered from a supplier. The supplier has one set of processes and the customer organization another. This supplier delivers multiple versions of this major subsystem. The customer integrates this subsystem into the larger system […]

Teams must grow; teams cannot be simply appointed and anointed. We may have a designated group that evolves into a team, but this emergent phenomenon takes time. It takes time to discover the strengths and weakness if each member of the group, understanding that ultimately transforms into trust, the backbone value/concept for any successful team. […]