With increased focus on customer value and intense pressure to get products to market faster, leaders are always looking for ways to trim the fat. They frequently ask themselves, “How can we do more, faster?”
Lean principles provide a path for increased efficiency that can be applied to all processes, including requirements elicitation and analysis.Is your requirements process lean?
Here are some symptoms of a not-so-lean requirements process:
- Requirements artifacts that are not used
- Requirements waiting around, likely to change
- Requirements documents that stakeholders don’t understand
- Requirements meetings that waste time
- Reworking the requirements document multiple times per stakeholder request vs. shared understanding before writing it
- Requirements that don’t fit into solution scope, and undefined solution scope
- Huge backlog of customer reported defects and enhancement requests after release
With Lean principles as a framework, here are questions you can ask yourself to apply lean principles to your requirements process:
1. Identify Value
- Who is the end customer in the requirements process?
- Is there more than one end customer? If so, does the value vary for each end customer?
- Does the requirements process bring value to the end customer? If so, what value does it bring? If not, how can the requirements process be modified to bring value?
2. Map the value stream
- What are the steps in your requirements process?
- Who do they provide value for? Do they provide value for the end customer or for someone else?
- Are there steps that do not provide value?
3. Create Flow
- Is your requirements process smooth/streamlined?
- Are there gaps or delays or bottlenecks or constraints in your flow to the end customer?
4. Establish Pull
- How long does it take to get to customer requests and needs?
- Are we able to respond to customer requests and needs in real time?
- Are customer needs invalid by the time we get to them?
5. Seek perfection
- Do you continuously evaluate your requirements process to remove waste?
- Should you modify your requirements approach for each project/product/program?