Following from People and Process Parts 1 and 2, in this post we’ll focus on the of key issue of POOR REQUIREMENTS GATHERING AND MANAGEMENT. This issue will also hit your bottom line by hampering your ability to move faster and execute cheaper and better.
The importance of tight, comprehensive, timely and approved template and content specifications cannot be understated.
The benefit to business product owners, subject matter experts, developers and testers, and to project managers when delivering to sharp deadlines, should be apparent, as should the loss of time and effort if requirements and specifications are less than spot on.
We often observe unstructured practice and inconsistent use of tools when gathering and managing requirements and template specifications.
For example, with requirements and, more particularly, specification management external to CCM solutions organisations have to typically use a combination of email, Word, Excel, sticky notes and other tools perhaps ill-suited to the end-to-end purpose, such as Jira or Confluence. Overlay these tools with design-by-committee meetings and ad hoc conversations and confusion can ensue.
In the end it is:
- business product owners and subject matter experts who must easily be able to sign-off business-understandable template specifications and review prototype / sample outputs.
- developers and testers who must be able to work with technical specifications.
The key reason: to de-risk and expedite the process through to production deployment.
To achieve this it is paramount to underpin processes with workflow so that all relevant stakeholders, following an agreed RACI Responsibility Assignment matrix, can review and sign-off as agreed.
Without auditable workflow-supported requirements and specification management, including collaborative, conversational review and approval, your organisation will experience:
- Longer review and approval cycles
- Approval managed via email – no auditability
- Longer rework cycles
- Poor governance, visibility and control of shared content
- Limited ability to analyse dependencies and the impact of change
- Poor business visibility of what is in Production
- Little to no version control
- Outdated or incomplete documentation
Turnaround will be slower and the impacts on rework and testing will be significant.
To de-risk, significantly improve quality assurance and to expedite your process through to production deployment virsaicTM SPECIFY and virsaicTM AUTOMATE deliver every time. From the early drafting of template specifications through tight review and approval to build.
Move away from ad hoc tools and processes to virsaicTM SPECIFY and virsaicTM AUTOMATE. Here is how it works…
