Importance of Requirements in Sourcing

Requirements Gathering is one of the most essential part of any project and project management. Clearly understanding what is required by a project to deliver is critical to its success. This may seem to be obvious and trivial, but is often most ignored area in any IT project. It is also one of the most common reasons for the failure of the projects.

There are many ways in which such a situation can be avoided:

• Confirm and reconfirm: Never make any kind of assumption. It’s always a good idea to get every assumption clarified from the customer.
• Involve the customer/users from the beginning of project and make sure there is adequate alignment at each stage.
• Clearly define and agree the objectives and scope of the project.
• Ensure all the requirements are clear, specific, realistic and measurable.
• Requirement document should be clear, precise and easy to understand. Also it should be shared with the customer after each updation.
• Avoid talking technology or solutions until the requirements are fully understood.
• Get the signoff for all the requirements with the stakeholders before the project starts.
• Create a prototype/UI design if possible to confirm or refine the customers’ requirements. This would help customer visualizing the requirements and ironing out any existing gaps.
• The solution finalized should be aligned with the product vision and must be scalable and adaptable

Current software applications often operate over multiple platforms and across geographies around the globe. Often during the project lifecycle the demands keep varying and this can also have an impact in eliciting proper requirements. Thus the development model should be flexible enough to encompass the varying requirements and adapt according to the change.

It has been found that one of the main reasons why software projects fail is because requirements of the project were not captured properly. Thus it is critical to take into account various measures to ensure that we do it right at the first time and deliver the right value as per customer expectations.

About Author:

Harsh Saraogi is consultant and part of Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. He is a part of consulting team that delivers Sourcing and Vendor Management Office projects. He can be contacted at: harshvardhan.s@spluspl.com