We have posted last Thursday’s “Transform your BA Practice through Iterative Requirements Validation” executive webinar as an on-demand webinar. 

In this special edition Webinar, you will learn how a Fortune 50 organization has put in place an iterative requirements validation process through requirements definition solutions. You will learn how BA’s are the control point to ensure alignment of distributed and global teams

View the webinar below:

As a reminder, on Thursday,  the Requirements.net consortium kicks off our 2009 Executive Webinar series with a presentation from Blueprint and Orasi Software on Iterative Requirements Validation.

The webinar abstract is as follows:

  “Our BA practice has been re-organized, re-tooled, and is now a driving force in our company’s IT project plan”
– Director of BAs, Fortune 50 Retail

Join the Requirements.net consortium as we discuss how today’s economic environment is driving business analysts to transform their approach to requirements definition.  In this special edition webinar, you will learn how a Fortune 50 organization has put in place an iterative requirements validation process through requirements definition solutions.  You will learn how BA’s are the control point to ensure alignment of distributed and global teams.

Time: 2:00PM EST, February 12, 2009

Over 300 people have registered.  You can register here.

The Requirements.net “Maximize IT Value” podcast series continues with an exclusive interview with Brian Cook, CEO of Cook Enterprises Corporation.

Brian is a 20 year business analysis veteran, with a long history of advocating a model-based approach to requirements definition. His experience includes a tenure in the Financial industry, and driving a methodology which was adopted to control costs and ensure project timelines. He has led requirements development for distributed teams, including working with outsourcing providers. He now consults to customers in the Fortune 500 to help bring requirements efficiency to help “maximize IT value.”

Brian also drives the content behind a newly launch internet portal called “Building Requirements Consensus” which is located at http://building-requirements-consensus.com.

This Podcast includes references to many informational sources (at http://building-requirements-consensus.com) and provides some hands-on advise to those struggling to find the balance between use-cases, requirements lists, and international requirements communication.

Download it here.

We are pleased to introduce our first Podcast in our new series “Maximizing IT Value”.

Join the first podcast in a new series entitled “Maximizing IT Value”. In this Podcast, Keith Barrett and Matthew Morgan interview one of the industry’s strongest BAs, Jonathan Babcock. Jonathan is a career business analyst, who has contributed to dozens of successful IT implementations. He understands well written requirements and how the business analyst should be empowered for organizational success.

Jonathan Babcock is also the man behind “JonathanBabcock.com”, one of the fastest growing blogs in the BA space. Jonathan has posted on everything from Use Cases to the Economy. His readers include some of the most talented experts in our field. You can visit his blog at http://JonathanBabcock.com.

Jonathan speaks on today’s economic environment and how organizations should be adapting. He tells the stories of successful projects, and the….not-so-successful ones.

Get it here.
 

If 2008 was the year of the economic crash…. it would seem fit to believe that 2009 will be the start of a recovery.

This is the perfect opportunity for us to refresh our focus and begin the discussion of how Requirements and BA empowerment is a cornerstone to helping our respective companies maximize the value they see out of IT software projects.

Why “Value?”

With the focus on cost-cutting, and the cancellation of “extraneous efforts and projects” dominating meeting rooms in many of the Fortune 500, the idea of “optimizing” of existing investments is now the topic of modern times.

When we speak with BA’s in the Internet community, we hear how clear, precise, and validated requirements efforts help drive efficiencies that cut waste.  By cutting waste, BA’s are in fact the hinge to driving value for modern projects.

But this discussion is more than just about cutting waste… it is also about ensuring that the actual IT software/system actually adds … here’s that word again … value.    If you think about it, software projects are not a supporting actor in business operations, they are (in most cases), the competitive advantage that organizations use to run their business.

One of our reader emails nicely summarizes this point of view:

“The customer facing applications my team develop have a huge impact on how well we do as a company.    When our offshore development teams make mistakes and incorrectly understand our requirements, we end up introducing a difficult to use system to our customers.   This impacts everything:    Customer Retention. Satisfaction. and at the end of the day, Revenue.

“95% of  these mistakes come from the fact that we do not spend enough time reviewing our requirements before coding begins.” - Mark Thomson.

Big “V” vs. little “v”.

If software systems are our competitive advantage, and as Mark indicates, impacts everything down to the revenue of the company, then the value of successful projects ensures that our companies can compete in this economic climate.   This is a much larger discussion than simply cutting costs, its about ensuring viability for our business initiatives in this climate.    Let’s call this big V.

A great example of successful software transforming a business is Apple’s iTunes and the new Apple Appstore for iPhone.   This entire business is a self-service software application, that sits in the cloud, and processes millions of transactions a minute.      According to Apple’s recent quarter end results, this combination of software and hardware (iPod/iPhone)  was the catalyst to the top-line growth that enabled the company to break through the $10B per quarter barrier in today’s economic climate. 

This application is all about the ease of use, instant availability, how well it works with other systems (PCs, Macs), and the library of assets offered.    Clearly, Apple is enjoying success due to the value of this complex project.

Could you imagine the requirement’s JAD session for this project?   I seriously doubt the requirement definition session was cut-short, or the analysis time-line was trimmed, or they didn’t validate the requirements specs completely…  this is a classic example of software designed specifically for end-user delight.

From our perspective, Business Analyst’s hold to key to big V Value as they have the subject-matter-expertise and business context that organizations must infuse in design, development, testing, and project management functions of IT.    As such,  BA’s bring the “why”, “what”, “who”. and “how” to the table, and IT development facilitates these requirements with innovative systems.

As far as little v value, well, our point-of-view is that “little v” is the very-imporant efficiency component of IT projects.  If you have a $3M budget, you better not turn in a $5M bill.    Many analysts have written facts about the impact of “poor requirements” and the mess that rework has created on project timelines and budgets.

A great quote from one of our reader comments summarizes this nicely:

“Our last customer service application budget was for 3.27M over 12 months, for two major versions We ended up only completing only one version, as the initial project crept forward after UAT. My company revamped the project plan to accommodate this learning cycle as the PMO called it.

The problem was that this wasn’t a learning cycle. It was a failed cycle. We spend hourly with our team of outsourced development, and all of this roles to the project budget.” - Richard.

So, little v is important too.    If a company has to spend an extra million here… or there… to fill in the gaps from poor requirements, thats a million less it can spend marketing and selling it’s products.  In today’s economy, there are less “millions” available for overun such as this.

Enough… lets start the series.

So, we start a new series focusing on Value from the BA (both little v and big V).   We look forward to working with the community and bringing forward spirited comments, debate, and interviews as we discuss BA empowerment as a weapon against the economic downturn.

By far our most popular Podcast.  Ever.In just 40 days, over 400 unique people have downloaded the Theresa Lanowitz Interview on IT Spending into today’s economic environment.   Business Analyst’s can take comfort in her statements on how critical their job function is to cutting IT costs in this complex financial situation.    Requirements definition professionals (ie BAs) and empowerment tools/workbenches cut costs by eliminating rework and shortening project time lines.Today, we are posting this Podcast to our library on iTunes.  You can subscribe to our Requirements.net Podcast library through iTunes (see sidebar) or download the Theresa Lanowitz Podcast interview directly here.

 The Requirements.net consortium is pleased to announce our 2009 Requirements.net executive webinars. Last year, Requirements.net hosted highly successful, in-person executive breakfast sessions in Washington DC, New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Toronto. In order to reach more people, this year, we will be leveraging the power of the Internet to host a series of special interest webinars.The consortium selected topics which we believe are critical to Global 2000 IT in dealing with today’s economic environment. These four topics will be discussed across seven webinar events, with speakers from Requirements.net members.Registration is free – if your job is to deliver high-quality software on minimum budgets, you will get a lot out of our 2009 series.Here is the calendar of our webinars, and be sure to bookmark http://requirements.net/events.

Requirements.net is pleased to announce the Call for 2009 Consortium Membership

On behalf of the Requirements.net consortium, we are officially announcing the 2009 member enrollment program. Requirements.net is the industry’s largest consortium for the advancement of Business Analyst empowerment. Founded in 2008, Requirements.net is an organically created forum of companies including RQNG (Requirements Networking Group), HP Software (which produces the industry leading requirements and quality management platform), Blueprint (the leading provider of requirements solutions for software businesss analysts), Orasi Software (the company credited with the invention of Requirements Management as a category), SKY IT Group (a leading provider of solution and educational consulting for HP, IBM, Blueprint and other integration technologies), and CorTechs (a leading provider solution consolting for quality lifecycle implementations for HP Software and Blueprint).

In 2008, the Requirements.net consortium produced some of the industry’s most respected thought leadership published works which included hundreds of BLOG postings, major ground-breaking open IP whitepapers ( including the BA Workbench Buyer’s Guide and Whitepaper, How to Develop Requirements in an AGILE world, the HP Guide to Quality Management, and why Requirements are a top CIO priority). In addition, Requirements.net produces the industry’s most popular requirements podcast (entitled Requirements Unplugged), with over a dozen episodes across two complete seasons. Requirements.net’s podcasts are distributed through Apple’s iTunes and are compatible with the iPod/iPhone music player. In 2008, Requirements.net also hosted a dozen of executive breakfast seminars, with over 150 C-level executives in attendance.

In 2008, Requirements.net also partnered with Voke Inc (www.vokeinc.com) in the creation of the new vokestream BA Market Snapshot, one of the first analyst reports focused on the BA marketspace as a new category. As part of this effort, Requirements.net conducted an industry survey of 100s of business analysts to isolate key industry trends.

Requirements.net has also become one of the most popular web destinations for company’s looking for requirements related best practices and concepts. In 2008, Requirements.net hosted over 7000 downloads of best-practice whitepapers, Podcasts, and analyst reports.

Enrollment for 2009 will be conducted through March 15th, we are accepting only a limited number of new members, and membership must be approved by Requirements.net consortium board. For more information, please email your contact information to Matt.Morgan@requirements.net.

We are concluding our Requirements.net consortium series entitled “The Economy and the Business Analyst” with a summary of the assets available for download.     The Requirements.net consortium is a collection of company’s supporting the industry trend toward IT efficiency through Business Analyst empowerment.  Members of the requirements.net consortium include RQNG (www.requirementsnetwork.com), HP Software (www.hp.com), Blueprint (www.blueprintsys.com), Orasi Software (www.orasi.com), SkyIT Group (www.skyitgroup.com), and CorTechs (www.cortechs.com).

As a summary of the series assets available for download:

Series Podcasts: We have published three Podcasts as part of this series, all of which are available for download at no charge.  As a summary:

1. Podcast:  Theresa Lanowitz on the Economy and IT Spending - In this exclusive podcast, Theresa discusses the importance of BA empowerment and the Requirements Definition Lifecycle to help control IT costs.    Download here.
2. Podcast:  The Grandfather of Requirements on IT Project Failure, the Economy, and Requirements -In this episode, Steven Davis (recognized as one of the minds behinds Requirements Management as an industry category) speaks on how CIO’s can transform efficiency of their projects through Requirements.  Download it here.
3. Podcast:  The Economic Crash -Kicking off this series, Matt Morgan and Keith Barrett discuss Gartner’s top three spending priorities from the ITXpo show in Orlando in October.    Matt and Keith also look at Carnival Cruise lines and how they are embracing requirements to cut costs.  Download it here.

Analyst Reports:   We focused on some advanced research from analyst firm voke on the requirements spending to ensure cost savings.    We also discussed the Gartner ITXpo findings on top spending criteria in this economic environment

1. Voke Analyst Report “Fortune 500 Company’s Must Spend to Cut IT Costs in 2009.   - written by Theresa Lanowitz and Lisa Dronzek discusses the importance of Requirements Definition to ensure IT control costs.  Download it here.
2. Gartner ITXpo Spending Priorities for 2009 - read the blog discussion around the top 3 spending trends for IT in 2009.  Read it now.

Whitepapers and Surveys -

1. The Business Analyst Workbench Whitepaper:  We posted an updated Requirements.net consortium BA Workbench whitepaper, which focuses on how BA’s can visualize requirements to reduce rework and eliminate costly mistakes with offshore teams.   Download it here.
   
2. The Voke Economic Survey: Voke has launched a survey looking at IT spending.  You can participate here.

Best reader quotes from email and from the blog comment system:

 ”I’m very interested in the “workbench” concept and the impact it will have on the BA role. Again, thanks for the great read. It definitely provided some food for thought.” - Jonathan

“First, it may be a good time for shareholders to engage. One may say it’s a CEOs who’re responsible for the results after all. But sometimes even CEOs can not cope with problems on their on, especially when major shareholders involved in business routine. How, for example, can you approach a slippery question of changing product distribution schemes, rules and policies within a retail chain if this particular part of the business is in possession of one of shareholder’s nephew? Difficult times are the best catalysts for business owners to start sorting out their priorities. The best and smartest changes possible elaborated carefully by greatest cross-departmental or cross-functional teams of business experts doomed to failure in situations when business owners are not entirely ready for them.”  - Yegor

“Hi Yegor. I think you have nailed a lot of our perspective here at our shop. I work for a large telecommunication company, one you may know by “the network”, but the problem is that even though I run a large 23 person shop, no one is asking me my opinion.” - Richard

“This is a good topic with a relevant connection to a lot of the purchasing approvals that we are trying to get out the door. I have 25% of my projects outsourced in 2008, but we want to see 40% in 09. Requirements is a big problem to making this transition. Our efficiency is way down with our outsourced teams and our do-over is way up.” - Nancy

“Listened to the podcast and it got me thinking about ways to connect requirements to outsourcing to virtualization.

In my mind, the idea of requirements to drive a lifecycle is only one of the big benefits. Theresa speaks to test case generation as a cost savings — never seen a requirements tool that does this, but should look around.  We see requirements as a way to “virtualize” the application before the task begins. What i mean is that by virtualize the application, we create a compelling story board of exactly what main functionality needs to be implemented. The more complete the virtual story board, the better. You are right when you say the do-over is much higher with outsourced teams. We see 5 - 10X failure from delivered code over the inhouse team. The costs are 70% lower, but the quality is atrocious.” -Richard

This will conclude Requirements.net publishing until the New Year, where we be kicking off 2009 with a new series.    We wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year.

Analyst firm voke has just launched a new survey looking at how IT project teams are being impacted by the economic environment. 

With the recent voke research report entitled “Fortune 500 Spending to reduce IT Costs” (and corresponding Podcast interview from r.net) on how Business Analysis is a critical to IT spending, this is one analyst firm that has demonstrated the clear understanding of the value of up-front investment to maximize IT value.

Weigh in here.