On Aligning business objectives with requirements
We cut 80% of features from scope that didn’t align with the stated business objectives, and still managed to deliver a $14 million increase in revenue. By closely considering the business value of each feature and its associated requirements, you can ensure that, not only is the project itself aligned with corporate business strategy, but also that the features of the project are aligned with the project’s business objectives - David Reinhardt
How do you determine what your clients’ customer wants without being reactive? Quick answer: Data Analysis. Gather the data on your client’s customer satisfaction surveys, user testing comments and customer usage data - Christine Wollmuth
The key is to have a logical structure that works for the project team and the wider stakeholder community. It’s important to avoid creating an uncontrolled ‘junk shop’ set of requirements where everything is present, but nobody can find it. Version control and maintaining some form of central repository is also important. It’s key to consider these things early on so that the requirements can be built and structured in the right way - Adrian Reed
A student in a project management class I taught once said, “Our project has a fixed budget, we can’t add any people, all of the features are critical, there can’t be any defects, and we have to finish on time.” This project isn’t likely to succeed. For each project, we need to decide which dimensions (Schedule, Cost, Staff, Quality and features) are most critical and how to balance the others so we can achieve the key project objectives - Karl Wiegers
The manager’s challenge, then, is to adjust the degrees of freedom to make the project succeed in meeting its success drivers within the limits imposed by the constraints. Constraints define restrictions within which the project manager must operate; the project manager has no flexibility around a constraint dimension. The project manager has a little flexibility around the drivers. A specified feature set might be the primary driver of the project, but features are a constraint if the feature set is not negotiable. Any project dimension that is neither a driver nor a constraint is a degree of freedom - Karl Wiegers
