kdr ebusiness

When considering any changes to the way your business operates, you should always start with a clearly defined set of business requirements.

A good business requirement should have the following attributes:

• Has a clear objective
• Possesses a measure of performance
• Should be high level
• Defines the expected benefits

It is particularly important to describe tangible and measurable benefits for your business requirement before you undertake the project to deliver it.

So here are some simple illustrative examples of business requirements that are Good, Bad and Ugly:

Good: We need to improve our system response times by 50%. This will increase the productivity in our back-office by reducing the amount of time spent waiting for information to display.

This has a measurable objective, and describes the expected benefit. It avoids going into too much detail and is therefore sufficiently high level. This could be improved by specifying actual productivity gains.

Bad: Our systems are slow, we need to make them quicker so that staff spend less time waiting.

This has an objective, but there is no measure of performance so there is no way to determine afterwards how effective the benefits are.

Ugly: We need to make our systems faster.

This type of requirement would have an unscrupulous vendor rubbing his hands with glee – you might end up spending a great deal more than you had to. And with no actual measures in place you might end up with a smaller improvement than was actually needed.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Articles, Business Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.