Of all the challenges faced by a business analyst, Poor Requirements, Changing Requirements, Scope Creep, Changing Deliverables, Changing Expectations, I believe that poor requirements are probably the most severe issue that can be faced by a project.
Change, scope creep, expectations etc can be managed while a project is in-flight by implementing good process. A problem with poor requirements however is different. There are always ways to improve how requirements are elicited and how they are written, others have mentioned this and I’ve talked about how to do this on my blog, but if you inherit poor requirements on an in-flight project, you options are limited and the impact is potentially catastrophic.
You face three big issues when you inherit poor requirements on a project:
1. The business has already invested the time in creating the requirements that currently exist. You won’t get that sort of quality time with them again; in truth they thought the analysis phase was a waste of time anyway.
2. You risk alienating both the development teams and the business if you start raising the number of change requests that are actually required to fix situations like this.
3. A strange sense of inertia will descend upon the team when you start pointing out how deficient the requirements are. It’s amazing how many people would rather deliver rubbish than what the business actually need.
So, faced with inertia, disgruntled stakeholders and a skeptical business, what is a conscientious Business Analyst to do? Let’s face it, at this stage the odds are stacked against you and you should probably be looking for a new project anyway, but if you fancy a challenge, you could try turning to an old friend, the test team.
Yes testers. This might seem a bit strange when you consider that in a traditional waterfall diagram, testing comes somewhere at the end of the development cycle especially being that the longer a bug goes identified the more expensive it is to fix. Don’t forget though that testers test requirements, not code.
This gives you license to let the testers loose on the requirements that do exist and challenge them to come up with suitable test cases. Once this happens, things are going to get very painful for everyone, but you will have found yourself a very potent ally.
A developer won’t be so keen on moving forwards with coding once he or she has a sense that their code will never get out of FAT testing. Likewise the business should be in test case review meetings and be faced with a barrage of questions, that will, hopefully, open up doubts in their mind that this requirements phase is as closed as they initially thought it was.
Like I said, it’s going to be a painful process, no one is going to be happy, but this is your last chance to salvage something from the project. I’ve only been in this position once myself and it will take all of your skills just to deal with the political fall out from this approach.
How did it work out for me? We de-scoped a lot of work and concentrated on what little we could safely say was required. While this was a success, it also resulted in timelines being slashed to allow the start of the new development cycle to begin, only this time with proper requirements. Definitely a victory, but a very painful one.
I’d be very interested in hearing how other Business Analysts have dealt with this challenge?
If you’re interested in seeing more articles related to the role of a Business Analyst, then why not subscribe via the RSS feed.
This article originally appeared as a comment on Linkedin in the IIBA discussion group.
0 Responses to “Dealing with Poor Requirements”