Situation
Major telecommunications manufacturer was struggling to address cost overruns while maintaining product quality due to a lack of requirements management knowledge and infrastructure.
Task
WiserWulff identified a lack of accountability from both the IT department and the executives that left ambiguities in the business requirements unresolved. The resulting late discovery of real business needs led to challenges in each proceeding stage of the project:
- Design: Nebulous requirements about what was needed led to incomplete or incorrect design details.
- Development: Project developers were frequently left to make their own interpretations of the business needs, which too often led to redevelopment work during the programming phase.
- Testing: The end-users were uncovering missing business functions through testing, at a time when it’s expensive to make changes.
- Post-Implementation: Several clients were coming back with residual issues during post-implementation review.
In order to address these issues, WiserWulff needed to provide requirements management theories and supporting methodologies, and customize those methodologies to align with Avaya’s specific needs.
Action
WiserWulff provided these theories and methodologies via a comprehensive training program.
The training linked the textbook methods to the Processes and Technologies of the organization; for example: business requirements templates, system requirements templates, requirements traceability, matrices, et cetera.
Our consultants reinforced these concepts through an interactive workshop style, and through hands-on case studies using real-world examples. We took their pre-existing comprehensive requirements management and assimilated it into the organization: the initial project requests outline expanded into initial identification and elicitation of functional business requirements, which then expanded into detailed systems specification, which in turn, carried through the supporting traceability process that ensures that all requirements are carried through to the production implementation.
Benefits
Over the course of our engagement, Avaya improved an entire level on the Capability Maturity Model Integration. Pre-training evaluations were administered to all participants, and those same evaluations were compared to the post-training results, indicating a knowledge retention improvement of 25%, far out-stripping industry standards. The client reduced their cost and schedule overruns due to rework, which lowered overall costs and improved schedule performance. The satisfaction and overall relationship was markedly improved between the IT department and the stakeholders. The IT department and executives developed a relationship of appropriate accountability and clear communication.