After separate careers and a lifetime of experiences teaching, consulting and implementing effective requirements management processes, Ivy Hooks and Kristin Farry collaborated together on Customer-Centered Products. Their goal is to spread the word about the benefits of requirements management by appealing to and reaching the very segment of companies who control product development budgets and schedules, AND who often overlook the importance of requirements -- managers. This book both achieves and surpasses its goal, because not only are the authors' recommendations critical for management to heed, they provide needed wisdom to technical professionals as well.
The entire book is well written and packed full of workable solutions and models to combat requirements challenges, anecdotes and case histories to vividly illustrate concepts being explained, and concrete advice about the managers role in each step of the requirements process. While some requirements books preach about additional tasks to be done along the course of the system development process, Hooks and Farry provide a streamlined solution to requirements management that cuts out the fat from process steps, and reduces rework by getting the product correct the first time through. One of the most appealing aspects of this book was that the product requirements are not specific just to software -- they are equally applicable to all types of product development.
Requirements mismanagement can be as costly in other industries as it is in software development -- and management in any industry will find value in this book. (This effectively eliminates the ability of management to say "This is a book about requirements management of (specify any product) development -- it doesn't apply to my industry." It is an important book for managers everywhere who set deadlines, budgets and schedules without necessarily understanding the importance of requirements management.)
Hooks and Farry use common sense coupled with solid statistics to bring reality to their words of wisdom. When discussing the reasons for weak or ill-defined requirements processes, the authors examine how some of the elements of American culture may be at the very root of the problem. It is clear that some of the American strengths such as "Insistence on Choice" and our "Urge to Improvise" built this great country, and Hooks and Farry examine how these very "strengths" can actually serve to undermine and even sabotage our projects. Simply by being aware of the downside of strong attributes provides competitive insights that we can turn around in our own companies.
Chapter 3 introduces a realistic and straightforward model for those companies who lack a solid "Requirement Definition Process", and addresses the question Why Adopt a Process? The model consists of nine clearly defined steps, each of which is examined in its own chapter that follows. What makes this book easy to digest is the subdivision of chapters through the use of pointed management questions including: "How Much Effort Should You Invest in (insert step name)?" and "What Is the Manager's Role in (insert step name)." Each chapter concludes with a Sanity Check, providing questions to ensure that the implementation of a particular step is going to be an effective and contributory part of the requirements management process.
As I was reading through Customer-Centered Products, I tabbed the pages with notations I had made for inclusion in this review. After running out of "sticky flags" (the temporary sticky bookmarks I use to flag pages), I knew that this book was a winner. Some of my flagged pages contained "motherhood" statements, which will seem elementary to those long immersed in the requirements business, but for managers typically unaware of the enormous impact that requirements management has on product development, this book is a veritable goldmine of management level recommendations. A few of the notable excerpts I wanted to share with you include:
- In the Introduction (subtitled Managers and Requirements): "Imagine producing, delivering, or buying a product for 50 percent of what your competition spends. What could your company do with such a large competitive advantage? You could achieve that 50 percent cost reduction by changing your approach to defining the requirement for what you are producing or procuring. Smart requirement management offers the potential of eliminating rework, which consumes half of a typical project's resources!" What a powerful introductory statement -- and the statistics and references cited throughout support this statement.
- From Chapter 1: Requirements -- Structure for Success: "Bell Labs and IBM studies have determined that 80 percent of all product defects are inserted in the requirement definition stage of product development, the stage when you should define a product's needs and uses. In the 1970's and early 80's experts were reporting that 45 to 56 percent of all software product defects are inserted during requirement definition. Are we getting worse at defining requirements? No. We are getting better at everything else!"
- Chapter 7: Be Careful What You Ask For -- Writing Good Requirements: is valuable because it
Writing Requirements is NOT the first step in the model. The actual writing tasks follow
three, critical prerequisite steps: Scoping the Product, Developing Operational Concepts,
and Identifying Interfaces. It should be common sense to scope a product and know what type
of product it is expected to be -- before writing its detailed requirements, but in practice,
the quest for anything to be delivered quickly often results in behaviors governed by the need
for speed. Nuggets in this chapter include: "Common mistakes in this stage of the requirement
definition process:
- Making bad assumptions
- Writing implementation instead of requirements
- Describing operations instead of writing requirements
- Using incorrect terms or sentence structure
- Writing unverifiable requirements
- Missing requirements
- Over specifying requirements."
Customer-Centered Products examines how to set priorities for requirements, how to automate aspects of the requirements process, managing change and measuring requirement quality. The final words sum up this manual succinctly: "There is no magic in good requirement engineering. No be-all-end-all requirement engineering tools or analysis models exist... You, the manager, must set the pace by taking personal responsibility for the requirements... You must read your requirements and understand them every step of the way, throughout the entire product life cycle."
If you develop software under imposed, unrealistic schedules or know that there must be a way to tell management how important the requirements process really is to product development-- this book is your answer. In today's downsizing, and uncertain economic conditions, management needs answers that will create a better bottom line, minimize expensive product rework and deliver high quality products the first time. This book provides answers by pointing to the beginning of the product lifecycle -- the Requirements Management process. Now is the time and the place to do things right -- the first time, and Hooks' and Farry's book will show management how.