Goals: What Do You Want to Achieve?

When you are working with your stakeholders on detailed requirements, it is very easy to go off track and either spend time on irrelevant details or miss requirements that are important.

Your client is making an investment in a project to build a product. You need to understand the reason behind this investment by determining the precise benefits the project is to deliver. You also need a guide to help you steer your efforts toward those requirements that will make the greatest contributions to the expected business advantage.

The project goal is the highest-level requirement.

In other words, you need to know the goal of the project. You can think of the project goal as the highest-level requirement. All of the detailed requirements must make a positive contribution toward reaching that goal.

Your effort will pay handsome dividends if you spend a little time during the blastoff to reach a consensus on the goal of the project and to write it clearly, unambiguously, and in a measurable way so it quantifies the benefits of the project. This measurement also makes the goal testable.

Usually at the beginning of a project, unless you have very good ongoing collaboration with your strategic planners, the purpose of the project is vague or is stated in terms that almost any solution could satisfy. How do you make it clearer? Start with a statement of the user problem or background to the project. (We make this problem statement the first part of all our specifications. See the template in appendix B for a suggested format.)

Those stakeholders who represent the user or business side of the organization should confirm that you do, indeed, understand the problem, and that your problem statement is a fair and accurate one.

The customer has given you this background:

"Roads freeze in winter, and icy conditions cause road accidents that kill people. We need to be able to predict when a road is likely to freeze so that our depot can schedule a de-icing truck in time to prevent the road from freezing. We expect a new system to provide more accurate predictions of icy conditions by using thermal maps of the district and the road temperatures from weather stations installed in the roads, in addition to the weather forecasts. This will lead to more timely de-icing treatment than at present, which will reduce road accidents. We also want to eliminate indiscriminate treatment of roads, which wastes de-icing compounds and causes environmental damage."

Once you and your blastoff group know and can articulate the business problem, you can concentrate on discovering the requirements that will make the greatest contribution toward solving the problem.

You can use "purpose, advantage, measurement" (PAM) as a mnemonic to help you discover and analyze the goals.

The problem appears to be road accidents due to ice on the roads, and the solution to the problem is to treat the roads to prevent the ice from forming (and presumably to melt the ice if it has already formed). Thus you can write the purpose for this project as follows:

Purpose: To accurately forecast road freezing times and schedule de-icing treatment.

The purpose of the project should be not only to solve the problem, but also to provide a business advantage. Naturally, if there is an advantage, you must be able to measure it.

The purpose of the project is not only to solve the problem, but also to provide a business advantage.

The business advantage is the reductionideally the eliminationof accidents due to ice. The road authorities (the customers) are particularly interested in reducing the accident rate. You have been told:

"The new system will lead to more timely de-icing treatment than at present, which will reduce road accidents."

Thus you can define the advantage the business would like to get from the project as follows:

Advantage: To reduce road accidents by eliminating icy road conditions.

Is this advantage measurable? Yes. The success of the product you build can be measured by the reduction in the number of accidents where ice is a contributing factor:

Measurement: Accidents attributed to ice shall be no more than 15 percent of the total number of accidents during winter.

You have stated a measurable goal, and monitoring the accidents for a winter or two is reasonable. As accident statistics and police reports are already collected, you should have no trouble establishing whether the product you build is successful.

But is this a reasonable goal? Is the elimination of most of the accidents due to ice worth the cost and effort of building the product? And where did "15 percent of the total" come from, anyway? The Northumberland County Highways Department representative at the blastoff assures you that this is a target figure set by the county. If it can be achieved, the County Council will be happy, and they are prepared to spend money to achieve the target. Note that at this stage if there was no concrete goal or if the effort (we will deal with estimating the effort shortly) was too great given the business advantage, then now is the time to call a halt.

Is this goal feasible? Can a "timely de-icing treatment" lead to a reduction in accidents? And to as little as 15 percent of the total? One reason for having the key stakeholders present at the blastoff is to answer questions like this one. One of the stakeholders (see the description elsewhere in this chapter of how stakeholders are selected) is from the National Road Users Association. She assures you that this group's research shows ice treatment is effective and the expected reductions are realistic.

Is this goal achievable? The stakeholders representing the product designers and builders, the technical experts from the hardware side, and the meteorologist all assure the blastoff participants that the technology is available, or can be built, and that similar software problems have been solved previously by the team.

Note the major aspects of the project goal:

• Purpose: What should the product do?

• Advantage: What business advantage does it provide?

• Measurement: How do you measure the advantage?

• Reasonable: Given what you understand about the constraints, is it possible for the product to achieve the business advantage?

• Feasible: Given what you have learned from the blastoff, is it possible to build a product to achieve the measure?

• Achievable: Does the organization have (or can it acquire) the skills to build the product and operate it once built?

Sometimes projects have more than one purpose statement. Look at the customer's statement:

"We also want to eliminate indiscriminate treatment of roads, which wastes de-icing compounds and causes environmental damage."

This reveals another purpose for the project:

Purpose: To save money on winter road maintenance costs.

The advantage stemming from this purpose is that accurate forecasts reduce the cost of treatment because only roads in imminent danger of freezing are treated. Additionally, by preventing ice from forming on road surfaces, damage to roads is reduced. (When ice forms in cracks in the surface, it expands as it freezes and forces the crack to expand. Eventually, this process results in significant holes in the road surface.)

The advantage is straightforward:

Advantage: Reduced de-icing and road maintenance costs.

The measurement of "reduced costs" is usually expressed in monetary terms:

The cost of de-icing shall be reduced by 25 percent of the current cost of road treatment, and damage to roads from ice shall be reduced by 50 percent.

Naturally, you need to know the current costs and damage expenditures so that you will know when they have been reduced by 25 percent and 50 percent, respectively. If there is supporting material available, then cite it in your specification:

Supporting Materials: Thornes, J. E. Cost-Effective Snow and Ice Control for the Nineties. Third International Symposium on Snow and Ice Control Technology, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Vol. 1, Paper 24, 1992.

The engineers also know that applying too much salt compounds to roads damages the environment. By having a more accurate treatment, less material finds its way to the environs of the roads, and less damage results. This means that more accurate forecasts give you another advantage:

Advantage: To reduce damage to the environment by unnecessary application of de-icing compounds.

This advantage can be measured by comparing the amount of de-icing material used by the product with that used at present:

Measurement: The amount of de-icing chemicals needed to de-ice the authority's roads shall be reduced by 50 percent.

Supporting Materials: Thornes, J. E. Salt of the Earth. Surveyor Magazine, 8 December 1994, pp. 1618.

Note that the purpose statements result in an advantage and a measurement. If you cannot express an advantage for the purpose, or the advantage is not measurable, then it should not be part of your specification. For example, suppose the purpose of a project is something vague:

Purpose: To improve the way we do business.

The advantage here is unclear. Do we want the business to make more money, or do we want the business process to function more smoothly? Or something else? The discipline necessary to give the purpose an advantage and a measurement means that fuzzy or ill-defined purposes are far less likely to find their way into your specifications.

You cannot build the right product unless you know precisely what the product is intended to do and how the product's success is to be measured. Whether the using organization achieves the target set by the product purpose may depend on the way that it uses the product. Obviously, if the product is not used as intended, then it may fail to provide the advantages for which it was built. Thus the statement of project purpose must assume that the resulting product will be used as intended.

You cannot build the right product unless you know precisely what the product is intended to do and how the product's success is to be measured.