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Politicians still stand up in market squares, town halls and indeed in parliament to talk without the use of presentation software, chart wizards, laptops, projectors and a tangle of cables under the podium. So why do engineers, consultants and managers always seem to have all that paraphernalia between them and the audience every time they speak?
So it was that I found myself with nothing at all between me and an audience in the upstairs room at the Savoy Tup, and no props but a bar stool and a pint of beer for support. Actually I did bring one exhibit, but it wasn’t a piece of chart wizardry: just a photograph of a hand-built Indonesian outrigger boat.
The purpose of showing the photograph was that the boat wasn’t made in a boatyard, with cranes and engineering drawings and power tools and work rosters. It was made by hand, on a beach, entirely from wood, with nothing more complex than hatchets and hand-drills. How do you make a boat strong and watertight using such simple means? It isn’t easy.
Requirements, too, are simple but not easy. You can’t just write them down. Many small steps, many patient iterations of chopping and drilling, are needed to shape what looks at the end like a simple, obvious, robust structure, that can be understood at a glance.
These steps have an odd status: everybody feels they know them when they are explained; but few projects take them seriously. Here’s the list: vision (or mission if you like); stakeholders; goals; context (interfaces and scope); scenarios; qualities and constraints; rationale; definitions; measurements; priorities. There: you knew all that already? The point is that these things are simple, even obvious: would you really want to go ahead on a project without quickly sketching a map of your stakeholders, for example? But people do.
The other thing about requirements is that it’s no good just hatcheting away at some specification using the latest modelling tools. It has to be what people want, and that means going out and discovering what they want. When you do that, you immediately run into several difficulties. There are many possible sources, and time is short. And, when you do meet stakeholders, whether in individual interviews or group workshops, you find they are like the plain man in the art gallery: he doesn’t know much about art but he knows what he likes – when he sees it. And if he can’t see it in the gallery, he can’t describe it to you.
Your task is to step through the list of requirement elements – goals, scenarios and the rest – in a suitable mixture of discovery contexts – interviews, workshops, leafing through old documentation, trade-off studies – to put together a simple description that people can recognise as being what they like.
I told you it was simple but not easy.
There will be a fuller description of how to do it in my book “Discovering Requirements” which will be published by John Wiley in March 2009.
Ian Alexander
Categories: Discussions , Latest TPN highlights ,
8 April 2009
16 March 2009
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This evening was great and of general interest - thank you Ian. If you would like to be notified when Ian's book has been published, please email me Kirstie Connah from the details on the homepage.
Mrs Kirstie Connah,
16 Oct 2008
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