Chapter 7
Changing Your Requirements-Gathering Mindset
The success of any IT project is determined at the very beginning of the project life cycle, when the IT staff meets with business clients to gather requirements. But IT's track record with this important phase is similar to its history with project management itself: abysmal. Requirements have been gathered for decades, but most IT organizations have yet to discover a consistently successful way of sitting down with business clients, discussing their needs, and translating those needs into a useful system, enhancement, customization, or software package selection.
In fact, according to some statistics, poor requirements gathering is the cause of about 70 percent of today's technology project failures. That's because passing along one bad requirement is akin to throwing a stone into a pond and watching how far the ripples go. According to some calculations, each badly defined requirement results in 10 bad design statements, which then can multiply out to 100 incorrect coding statements. Even if that's an exaggeration, you can easily see how poor requirements negatively affect application integrity, maintenance costs, and client satisfaction. This is true whether you're looking to build a custom system, buy a new software package, or enhance an existing system.
Skipping requirements gathering is like building a house without a plan. For example, I've seen companies buy software that didn't meet their business needs, mainly ...
