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.
