Determining Project Requirements, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1

Introduction

If you don’t know where you’re going, chances are you will end up somewhere else.

— Yogi Berra

In the last ten years I have taught project management and requirements gathering to over 10,000 people worldwide. In most of those classes there has been discussion about why projects, especially IT projects, fail. Inevitably the number one reason comes back to unclear or changing requirements. When organizations try to address these problems, they often try for quick fixes such as buying new tools or hiring a consultant. However, it takes more than that. Good requirements do not come from a tool, or from a customer interview. They come from a repeatable set of processes that take the project from the early idea stage through ...