Given the economic downturn, "cheaper, better, faster" seems to be a universal mantra in business. To stay competitive, organizations must continually strive to be more agile and develop higher-quality solutions more quickly-despite obstacles such as geographically distributed teams, limited budgets and resources, quick delivery times, language barriers and government regulations. These challenges require teams to consider new ways of doing business so they can be more responsive to frequent business changes.

One area that businesses can optimize is their software development processes. If they want to be competitive, companies don't have the luxury of long development lifecycles. To keep timeframes short, organizations must foster a collaborative environment by making tasks and responsibilities transparent and breaking down silos across the development lifecycle.

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The requirements you capture must be stated in business terms, must be clearly stated, must be concise, and must be feasible. To ensure that requirements are clearly stated, you should have them proof read by someone external to the project (or at least someone not familiar with the requirements you've captured).

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A company with poor requirements practices is just asking for over-budget costs and regular failure, according to a new report by IAG Consulting. The report, entitled Business Analysis Benchmark, examined 110 enterprise technology projects at 100 companies to determine just how important project requirements really are.

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Agile development practices introduced, adopted and extended the XP-originated "User Story" as the primary currency for expressing application requirements within the agile enterprise. The just-in-time application of the user story simplified software development and eliminated the prior waterfall like practices of overly burdensome and overly constraining requirements specifications for agile teams.

However, as powerful as this innovative concept is, the user story by itself does not provide an adequate, nor sufficiently lean, construct for reasoning about investment, system-level requirements and acceptance testing across the larger software enterprises project team, program and portfolio organizational levels.

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Gathering and managing requirements are fundamental challenges in project management. Most successful projects have high quality project requirements. Projects can fail due to poor requirements at any time during the project lifecycle without effective requirements management. The Project Manager needs to assess and understand the uniqueness of the requirements gathering process for his/her individual project.

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The cancellation of the presidential helicopter brought everyone out of the wood work. The article's key point was "failure to manage requirements on the part of the government is a key cause of the cancellation." What started out as a $6.8B program grew to a $13B program. The president was quoted as saying "The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate."

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