Brief Guide to Requirements

This book presents a set of practical tools and techniques to improve an organization's ability to discover and articulate IT project requirements. Because requirements drive all other aspects of an IT project, articulating robust reliable requirements is an essential success factor for any IT organization. If project requirements are incorrect, ambiguous, or incomplete, even perfectly executed design and implementation processes will not yield results that meet customer expectations. When this happens, resources are wasted and customer relationships are seriously damaged. This book explores some of the underlying reasons why meeting the challenge of articulating correct, unambiguous, and complete IT project requirements presents so many difficulties for IT organizations, and introduces some fundamental principles of requirements management that can help organizations overcome these difficulties. More specifically, an array of practical tools and techniques for requirements discovery and articulation are explained, with examples provided demonstrating how these tools and techniques can make the requirements discovery process more reliable and robust.