Why do we need more Requirement Engineering in our life?

Can we live in a perfect world where "scope creep", "out of budget" can be prevented and projects delivered on-time, on-budget, on target? 

Everything starts with "business needs". Getting the requirement right for any data project is crucial. Everyone is talking about the "needs", "client focus", "customer focus".... but still a large part of the data projects are not succeeding fully. Who's at fault?

Did you see any crime? What can the experts say about it?  What do we know about our suspect? How can we know it better?

Did you experience any symptoms?

 

Raise your hand if any of those sentences look familiar. 

You need more requirement engineering in your life!

What the experts say?

It's pretty rare to find data specifically on business intelligence projects, but we can still find interesting research in the project management and software engineering fields.

The project management area says...

Karls E Wiegers in "Inspecting requirements" states 80% of solution rework and 50% of project errors can be attributed directly to a requirement engineering. Also, according to the Project Management Institute (survey: "Pulse of the profession 2017"), to the question "Of the projects started in your organization in the past 12 months that were deemed failures, what were the primary causes of those failures? (Select up to three), respondents answered (in order) "Change in organization's priorities", "Inaccurate requirement gathering", "Change in project objective", "Inadequate vision or goal for the project".

The requirement engineering area says...

The project SMART (2004) identifies software projects main failure factors. Requirements management is the directly incriminated area in 52% of cases. Let's repeat that: half of the project failures are directly related to requirement management. Astonishing, isn't it?! We got our principal suspect!

This obscure suspect.

If more than half of the project failures involve requirement management, we probably need to fill the gap.

Compare to the technical and development fields, only a few degrees exist. In reality, the requirement gathering is usually done by a BA with a business or technical background, developers directly, PM... It's quite rare to find people with a specific degree or even certified.

If we look at the bookstore shelves, they are full of developments and project management books, but only a few to none are dedicated to gathering requirements. In most of the bookstore, we cannot even find a dedicated shelve or a book. 

Get to know it better.

As we saw, the room for improvement is important... so the room for success! It's such great news.

First, we need to challenge the status quo. Let's say it: all the sentences starting this post have the same synonym: "we need to understand why and improve our practices!"

The objective of this blog is to give you some new tools, new perspectives you can apply. I will break down the theory and hope while you are in a meeting, you can be more creative, minimize scope creep, and evaluate the risk.

What are your main challenges and thoughts about data requirement process?  

Bibliography

• Karl E. Wiegers – Inspecting Requirements – StickyMinds.com Weekly Column, 30 July 2001 link

• PMI – Requirements Management: A Core Competency for Project and Program Success – link

• Project Smart. (2014), The Standish Group, 1995 Chaos Report. Available from: link.

• The Role of Requirements in the Success or Failure of Software Projects - International Review of Management and Marketing - Azham Hussain, Emmanuel O. C. Mkpojiogu, Fazillah Mohmad Kamal link