Can you plan without understanding what is it that you are planning for? e.g. what is it we are doing?

1
Can you plan without understanding what is it
that you are planning for?e.g. what is it we
are doing?
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Project Content and Deliverables

• Software Project Managers Ensures that
  Product/Project Deliverables and Contents are
• well understood
• clearly defined
• agreed to by all parties
• How do the project managers do this ?
• Project Managers Provides
• time
• skilled resources
• conducive environment
• process
• Project managers are getting results through
  others

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Often times projects are initiated
withoutcompleting understanding the requirements
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Why Requirements are NOT Understood

• Customers/Users
• not fully knowledgeable of all the requirements
• not good communicator (in IT)
• plain forgot
• inconsistent among themselves
• not motivated and too busy
• etc.
• Solution Providers
• misinterpretation and not listening well
• not familiar with the domain specific area and
  terminology
• under pressure to seize the project or make the
  sale
• delusion of capable of making anything happen
  under software
• plain forgot
• etc.

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General Requirements Management
Activities(tilted towards customized, large
software)
Agreeing and Initiating Requirements Step
Requirements Elicitation
Requirements Analysis and Prototyping
Requirements Specifications
Requirements Review
(as needed)
Agreeing and Sign-Off
Needs Additional Management Focus
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Requirements Used For Planning Purpose

• Functional Requirements (Major Functions)
• Used for estimating size LOC, FP, etc.
• Used for estimating effort/cost person-months
• Used for competitive analysis and market analysis
• Non-Functional Requirements
• Constraints such as performance standards etc.
  that may be used for estimating size and effort

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Requirements Prioritization for A Software
Product(Used more for software product
enterprises)
Requirements Sources
Support
Requirements Prioritization
Development
List of requirements input to the product plan
Requirements Repository
Product Management Board (e.g.
Release Management Council)
Sales
. . .
Customers
Consultants
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Project Management Board

• Potential candidates to help choose and
  prioritize the requirements
• application domain subject area expert
  (consultant / analyst)
• lead Architect,Developer, Designer
• customer / user support personnel
• customer / user representative (may be more than
  one)
• sales / marketing representative
• manager / executive who has authority over the
  resources
• strategic business planning
• training / education personnel
• Pick the ones that you believe will contribute
  to the prioritization of requirements
• technical feasibility and impact
• industry leadership, market positioning, product
  strategy
• user satisfaction, user needs, user wishes
• business and financial impact

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Requirements Prioritization List
Item
Item Description
Source
Priority
Status
Item Number used to identify and trace the item
A brief description of the item, pointing to a
specification document if necessary
Source of the request such as customer or
internal support
Assigned priority (e.g. 1 to 4 where 4 is the
highest priority)
Current status (e.g. accepted and included in
current product release, accepted for later
release, or rejected )
very relevant for business decisions for software
product companies
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Separate Requirements Activities from the rest
of the Project

• High Risk to provide any plan or cost estimate
  without understanding requirements
• Pull Requirements Management Activities Out from
  the software development cycle
• separate project
• priced initially, but may be included as project
  cost if given the rest of the project
• deliverable is a requirements specification
• still needs to be planned and managed
• Do planning of mini cycles of (req-dev-test)
  iteratively as in todays agile process.

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Word on Agile Process

• Caution --- helps but does not replace poor
  planning.
• Allows the requirements and product content to be
  viewed in chunks --- making planning and
  development easier
• Make sure you dont forget tasks that must handle
  general items and non-functional requirements.