There have been many articles written about requirements development from many perspectives.  I happen to believe this is one of the hardest tasks of any project, and one of the key contributors to scope creep.  As the initial scope statement is defined, everyone believes they understand it.  But the devil is always in the details.  As detailed requirements are elaborated from the scope definition, the misunderstandings emerge and the estimates in time and resources get blown.  Now as project manager you are faced with the all too familiar triple constraint dance of getting permission to add more resources, or time, or reducing some of the requirements.

Assuming the decision is to scale back on requirements, the real fight usually begins with stakeholders as to which ones.  If they have evolved as a veritable sea of equal and indistinguishable specifications, it comes down to an arm wrestle or the decision is based on criteria which may have little to do with business value. 

A better approach is to start the business requirement development process at a high level with an identification of goals and objectives.  In other words, get crisp and clear about what problem you’re trying to solve, or what pain you’re trying to alleviate; and what intermediate steps will be targeted to get you there.  Then align all requirements to one or more of the steps that are tied to the goals.  The idea is that while it is difficult to prioritize one requirement over another in a large universe – especially when many advocates are lobbying for their favorites, it is usually easy to prioritize or categorize goals.  Executive sponsors do this.  The requirements that stem from their parent goals inherit the relative priorities.

First off, a review of goals vs. objectives is in order, as many people confuse them. 

  • Goals are broad, lofty ideas.  They are intangible, abstract, and cannot be validated.  Goals are usually derived as responses to business need or opportunity.  Some examples of goals might be:  Gain a greater appreciation for Latin music, or Know about the human body. 
  • Objectives are succinct statements including key parameters in areas of time, scope, resources/cost and they are tied to a goal.  Objectives are SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound.  The goal is where we want to be, the objectives are the steps needed to get there.  Some examples of objectives related to the above goal examples might be: Attend 3 live concerts featuring Latin American music by the end of the semester.   Name all the bones in the human body as stated in the medical text book by the time I am scheduled to take my test.

With that as a backdrop, let’s consider a football analogy.  (I apologize in advance to my international colleagues, but this will be American football.)  Let’s say you are the coach of a college football team and you have a big game coming up against a rival team.  What is your goal?  Quite simply, to win the game!  No more specific than that.  The number of points doesn’t matter.  Now let’s say that based on your analysis of the other team’s skill and your team’s strength, you believe that in order to win the game your team needs to put up at least 24 points.  You don’t want to have to do all of that scoring at the end of the game so you tell your players that you want them to target at least the following scoring opportunities:

                By end of 1st Qtr – Field Goal

                By end of 2nd Qtr – Touchdown + Pt After

                By end of 3rd Qtr – Touchdown + Pt After

                By end of 4th Qtr – Touchdown + Pt After

 What you’ve just communicated are objectives tied to your goal.  They’re specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound.  You believe if the team achieves the above scoring objectives they will attain the related goal of winning the game.  So what are the requirements related to these objectives?  Simply stated, for the first one it is to snap the ball, hold it and kick it from the line of scrimmage so that it goes between the goal posts.  For the others, it is to move the ball down the field from the initial point of possession to and across the goal line.  Notice I didn’t say anything about running certain types of running plays or passing plays, various routes, etc.  Those are implementation details left to the designers of the plays.

 Now as a college coach you are also interested in the professional futures of your student athletes.  You may have some star players who are nearing a record of some type.  You have additional goals of helping your players advance in their future NFL careers.  That may drive objectives for certain players of helping them reach certain records within the season.  The related requirements to that objective would be putting the players in, so they can rack up the yards towards their record.  However, clearly this goal is secondary to the goal on this day of winning this game! 

 So you can see how tying requirements to objectives which are tied to goals helps categorize and prioritize which can assist when there are tough decisions to be made about scope of work on a project.