Requirement Management Failures and Fixes

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Requirement Management Failures and Fixes

Andrew Makar, PMP

September 19, 2007





The Chaos Report is a frequently referenced study that provides statistics on IT implementation failures and successes. You likely don’t need another industry statistic to understand poorly defined requirements result in poor project outcomes. While developing a lecture on requirements management, I found a few examples of project failure. The following categories are not a definitive list, but represent a high-level categorization of sources for requirement management failures.
 
Poorly Defined Requirements
We’ve all heard the phrase “Garbage in, garbage out.” A few years ago, a system implementation project suffered from poorly defined requirements and resulted in a failed project. The business customers thought they were providing good requirements for system development but ended up with garbage and fodder for this story.
 
The original scope of the project was to develop a simulation tool for a Microsoft Access database application.



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