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:
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:
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:
Thus you can define the advantage the business would like to get from the project as follows:
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:
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:
Sometimes projects have more than one purpose statement. Look at the customer's statement:
This reveals another purpose for the project:
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:
The measurement of "reduced costs" is usually expressed in monetary terms:
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:
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:
This advantage can be measured by comparing the amount of de-icing material used by the product with that used at present:
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:
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. |