Consulting Journal: Methods - Requirements: vague visions

Methods: Requirements: vague visions

by David Blakey

Vague visions of what is needed are the biggest single cause of project failure.

[Monday 31 January 2011]

Consultants are often brought in by a client when the client needs to write a specification during systems or services acquisition. There are two reasons for this.

First, clients believe that consultants will produce specifications that describe requirements that the client can only vaguely describe.

Second, clients believe that consultants will produce specifications that will avoid scope creep.

It is important that you are able satisfy these two needs.

Vague vision

Clients have a business to run. They rarely have an opportunity to take a vague vision of some innovation and expand it into a clear understanding of what that innovation will actually do for them and how they will use it. That becomes the task of the consultant, before you can begin to map out a simple project plan. It is a task that must be completed fully and properly before you can move onto the planning stage.

You must complete the vision stage fully and properly before you move on to the planning stage. It is often tempting to leave some areas of the vision unclear, because it is difficult or time-consuming to get the client to work with you on making that vision clear and precise. You must avoid that temptation. You must tell the client that either they work on getting those areas of the vision clarified or you will omit them from the specification, so that they will have to be added later, using additional time and money.

If the client puts effort into developing the vision at the start, you will be able to write detailed specifications that address that vision. If some areas are left unspecified, the client is making an assumption that those areas can be defined later and will still fit into the specifications and the project plan. This is rarely so.

Regardless of how vague the definition of part of the vision is, such as business intelligence systems for the HR department, it does already have a size. The size is not known, of course, but it does already exist. Now, given that you do not know what the size of that definition is and how long it will take to implement, what assumption can you make about it? Can you put forward an assumption of its size that you know will be at least the real size of the final vision? The answer is that you cannot. Even if you double your estimate of the size, you cannot honestly say that that doubled estimate will allow the final vision to be implemented.

This is a very simple truth about requirements definition and project planning. It is also one of the least known.

Actions

Here are the things that you need to do to avoid a vague vision moving into the specification.

Check that the client has a clear idea of what they want and why they want it, by asking each person to describe the vision.
Ensure that the client fills all gaps in their vision.
Repeat step 1 until step 2 is no longer needed.

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