Managing Business Requirements for Successful Project Delivery

What’s the best channel for feeding in business requirements for an emerging or planned IT project?

Establish a business team to capture, sanitise and refine business requirements before channelling them into IT or to allow IT to effectively manage the demand and supply side of delivery.

A business team can compromise of Business Analyst, Functional Analysts or Subject Matter Experts, and Business Project Managers who set the agenda in terms of specifying requirements in the form of functional specifications drive the user testing and drive the project forward. IT plays a supply side delivery role providing technical inputs

Alternatively, IT manages the demand side activities of capturing and refining business requirements and then decides how to allocate and manage IT delivery capability (supply side)

So what’s the best strategy to deploy in your organisation?

·         Depends on who owns the budgets? and whether the business decides to fund demand side roles

·         How mature the business community are in developing business requirements and mobilising projects

·         How does  IT strategy  define the level of in-house capability and capacity to support  IT projects

·         Defined by recent  history of delivering projects within your organisation and level of trust operating between key business functions and IT

Irrespective of the channel selected, the most important decision the organisation too often ignores is to establish a Projects Portfolio Office to ensure valuable resources and costs are managed effectively across all projects and that the business strategic objectives and business benefits are realised.