What to do when you don’t have funds to do your requirements up-front?
In my last blog I talked about how the Process MeNtOR requirements model provides the rigor needed to reliably determine the effort for a project. However, this approach being the big gun, it has its drawbacks. The cost for a complete requirements model consumes a large chunk of the overall project budget, and you may not be in a position to have such funds approved before the business case.
We recently had such a situation with a client of ours, a bank. This client wanted to explore the implementation of a new e-business venture that would offer a specific part of its services to smaller banks for reselling. This would entail changes to business practices, making the service relevant for its new partners and subsequently changes to a core application in the bank. Early estimates for this project ranged in the A$ 5-10 Million.
We were asked to provide a more reliable estimate but had only limited budget available. As input for this estimate we decided to produce a Process MeNtOR Requirements Definition – which is similar to a Requirements Model in structure but reduces the depth of the information. Process MeNtOR provides a template and guidance on how to produce the template. You use the standard requirements modeling activities out of Process MeNtOR to produce the content ; the guidance in the template will tell you to what depth you need to go.
Over four weeks we ran a total of four workshops with different participants and evaluated existing process documentation. The document was reviewed with management twice, once about midway and once for the final document. The total effort ran to 8 days on our side and produced a document of forty pages, covering essential business processes, skinny use cases, a business domain model, user interaction models, quantitative statements, assumptions and known issues. This document was used by the architect in conjunction with existing technical documentation to validate and narrow the original development budget.
Now the client has used this to justify the budget for doing a full requirements model – answering the original question.