Conventional Requirements Model Flaw Misses REAL Business Requirements
by Robin F. Goldsmith, JD
A fundamental flaw in the widely-held conventional model of requirements creates much of creep and other requirements difficulties. This flaw involves misunderstanding of the nature and role of REAL business requirements. The term “REAL” relates to requirements in two ways. The first way is widely recognizable and is represented in lower-case. People think they know what the requirements are and then learn differently and must revise their requirements definition. Thus, the “real” requirements are what one ends up with, as opposed to what one may have thought initially.
The second use of “REAL” warrants distinguishing with upper case because it represents breakthrough awareness that REAL requirements are business requirements, which are in business terms and are what must be delivered to provide value.
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| Conventional Requirements Model Flaw Misses REAL Business Requirements.pdf | 158.75 KB |
All comes down to problem framing and analysis
I looked at Robin's book a while back, and i thought it was a very good read. From a personal perspective, it re-enforced my experience over the last 15 years, that a lot of projects do very minimal work around problem analysis. In simplistic terms, this would involve identify or clarify the over-arching problem and/or oppoortunity being addressed, eliciting the underlying issues and painpoints to be addressed, identify the expected benefits to be realised and arriving at set of stakeholder needs that address one or more of the issues. This then acts as a guiding framework for business requirements analyis and definition work going downstream.
This may be an oversimplification, but is this not what is meant by the REAL business requirements? This is becoming more recognised in industry as a lot of companies have been burnt by not spending time to do these activities where they are justified.
Anyway, just my thoughts :-)
Dimitri