In the process of project implementation, project managers often face a major challenge – requirements change. Demand changes are everywhere, such as changes in market conditions, new business, adjustment of strategic objectives, modification of customer needs, and resource constraints.
Changes in requirements can affect project time, cost and quality, and have a serious impact on the entire project and team members. It can also be found in the “China DevOps Status Survey Report (2019)” released by China Telecommunications Institute that 59.68% of enterprises believe that frequent changes in requirements are the main reason for impeding software delivery on time. In order to help project managers deal with change and minimize the impact of change, this issue of Project 100 questions will share with you how to solve change requirements.
Manage requirement changes to avoid project delays
1. Embrace change and embrace it positively
In agile practice, software development needs to constantly meet the needs of users, through continuous delivery, so that the product gradually meets the needs of customers in the process of gradual improvement. As in the Agile Manifesto, “Embracing Change,” project managers should not passively resist requirements change, but should instead anticipate requirements change and proactively promote it.
On the premise of ensuring the R&D schedule, project managers need to actively embrace changes, seriously face demand changes, control the pace of demand changes through reasonable methods, actively promote demand changes, and strive to find and solve the real needs of customers.
2. Hierarchical management, holding change meetings
While we should actively embrace change, we should also evaluate the new requirements and hold requirements change meetings to discuss whether or not to accept the change. New requirements are managed in a hierarchical manner according to their importance and priority, and the impact of rework volume and resource waste is comprehensively assessed.
3. Update the schedule and adjust the project cycle
After accepting the requirement change, the project manager should output a requirement change plan, inform the team of the time and resource changes caused by each change, and update the project schedule according to the latest requirement plan to ensure the smooth progress of the project.
The foregoing is a remedy after all, never better than to be prepared for a rainy day. Project managers should avoid passive situations and use Ones to manage requirements, control project schedule and avoid project delays.
Ones helps you manage requirements changes
1. Standardize documents and introduce requirement change management mechanism
The easiest way to control requirements change is to introduce a requirements change mechanism to define the scope and manner of the change before you start. Determining strict and formal requirements change workflow based on specific business scenarios to prevent schedule delays caused by arbitrary and unnecessary requirements changes. Share Ones Wiki documentation to standardize the requirements change template and approval process for all project members.
2. Set up workflow and manage requirements visually
Visually and structurally manage requirements, synchronize requirements pool in a timely manner, publicize the overall scheduling plan, and reduce changes caused by information asymmetry. Once the risk of change is found, it should be dealt with in time to avoid the accumulation of risks.
Using Ones Project, create requirements work item types in the Project for requirements pool management. Input the demand list, which contains complete description, product documents, prototypes and other materials needed for reference in the follow-up research and development process, so as to facilitate the review and flow of the follow-up research and development process.
3. Refining requirements review and doing a good job in requirements assessment
After collecting and analyzing requirements, be sure to conduct a requirements review. The review process itself is also a process of knowledge transfer. In the requirements review meeting, all project stakeholders participate in the discussion to clarify the requirements definition and scenarios, reach a unified cognition and consensus, and construct valuable requirements. In the process of approving unreasonable requirements, recognizing the irrationality of requirements can naturally reduce invalid changes.
Demand change is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can optimize product functions and improve user experience; on the other hand, it will increase research and development cost and cause project delay. Therefore, it is necessary to treat demand change correctly, minimize the impact of demand change and guarantee the quality of product delivery by visualizing demand pool, doing a good job of requirement assessment, tracking demand and standardizing management mechanism.
ONES helps project managers to collect and analyze requirements, control the pace of product development, track the progress and quality of research and development, deliver products efficiently and with high quality, and help enterprises to release products better and faster. To learn more about the Ones solution, visit https://ones.ai
Want to get the original DevOps Survey Report in China? Just add ONES_2020 and say “DevOps” to get it.