Why Projects Fail and What You can do About It

Software projects have the power to increase a company’s bottom line while simultaneously creating more efficient business processes. Most are either delivered late, way over budget, don’t meet customer needs, or are cancelled altogether. According to the Business Analysis Benchmark 2008 study that surveyed 110 companies, nearly seven out of 10 companies involved in development projects valued at $250,000 or more have software projects that are marginal in quality and function—or are complete failures. These failures occur early on in the development phase of the project—when requirements are first conceived and documented. According to Borland, the cost of correcting an erroneous requirement after a project has been released can be 100 times more expensive than if the error is discovered during the requirements development phase.

The right processes and software can help you optimize the requirements definition and management (RDM) and use it as a powerful lever to ensure project success. Requirements define the scope of work that developers and testers must execute on and project managers must manage to completion. When done well, requirements definition management (RDM) is a collaborative process of collecting, documenting, and validating a set of requirements that key project stakeholders and those responsible for building the software agree on. According to Standish Group (2004) three of the top five reasons software projects fail are tied to requirements:

• Users are not involved enough in requirements definition, which leads to inaccurate requirement
• Requirements are incomplete or don’t meet acceptance criteria
• Requirements are constantly changing, but these changes are not managed effectively

Your core business depends on the optimization of RDM. No longer can software development be classified as an IT process or project. It is more about the future of your company and its competitive advantage. Borland, an open ALM company, offers two products for defining and managing software requirements. Borland Caliber DefineIT is a complete software requirements definition system that provides support across four key requirements definition process areas: elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation. Borland CaliberRM is an enterprise software requirements management tool that facilitates collaboration, impact analysis, and communication, thereby enabling your software teams to deliver on key project milestones with greater accuracy and predictability.

Ravenflow, an award winning company in the requirements and definition department, recently unveiled RAVEN Express. It’s the world’s first requirements elicitation and definition product that directly integrates with Microsoft Word™. This innovative solution empowers business analysts to play a more active role in the requirements process, enabling them to automatically identify missing or incomplete requirements in Word documents with the push of a button. Requirements can come from all directions. Without collaboration, it is difficult to generate a consensus of requirements. Stakeholders will want to focus only on items that interest them. Without the right tools and automation in place, managing changes to requirements can be incredibly complex. Capturing and validating requirements up front will insure your project sets off on the right path, and stays there.