Requirements Management Link Love (09-13)

A little linky love this week for those of us who like to read all about requirements management.

• John Simpson of Jama Software (makers of the Contour requirements management tool) and I have carried on a little dialog on requirements over the past week. He posted some of the Q&A’s on the Jama blog. Go have a look, but here’s a teaser:

Jama: If you had one fundamental tip to provide people, what would it be?

Jonathan: If it had to be just one, it would be to strive to satisfy ALL your customers.  As business analysts, we work with the IT delivery organization to deliver products that satisfy business needs.  That’s the obvious part.

What’s less evident, but perhaps equally important is that we also work with the business to meet the needs of the IT delivery organization (sort of a “help me to help you” scenario).  As consumers of the business analyst’s products, the designers, developers and QA folks are also very much a business analyst’s customers.

I think focusing on the consumers of our deliverables as customers gets us to the point where we acknowledge that writing a bunch of requirements statements and tossing them over the wall is not meeting the internal customer’s needs.  It drives us to the type of collaboration that results in good requirements and successful projects.

• Genefa Murphy, Product Manager for HP’s requirement management solution maintains a blog dedicated to RM.  (h/t Requirements.net)

• This article on Computer World posits that requirements management tools can be used to make communication about requirements “more organized and successful”, and provides some real-world examples.

• Bright Green Projects and Playground are a couple new, web-based requirements management tools that I’ve been informed of over the last week. I’m always interested in evaluating new tools, and they both seem to show promise.

• Check out my previous post on requirements management resources, too, for more good reads on RM and links to other management tools.

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