Users don't know what they want until you
show it to them.
-Unknown
As good requirements are trickling in, it is
important to think about their implications and how all the requirements are
interrelated. After all, we are putting together an entire solution that will
meet the requirements in a seamless manner. Two or more requirements in
combination can actually generate a third requirement. Let’s examine this
over-simplified example.
Requirement 1: The system will be able to
receive alerts via CAP 1.1 and CAP 1.2.
Requirement 2: The system will allow the user
to distribute incoming messages via CAP 1.1 and CAP 1.2 through a variety of
channels to include CCTV video displays, speaker arrays, telephone
speakerphones, computers and SMS.
So this is pretty straight forward; we
receive alerts via a specific protocol and the user can send the message out
via a wide variety of systems. Let’s see how it would play out in real world.
An alert comes in and the user sees the
alert. The user goes into the CCTV system to publish it to displays. Then the
user taps into the speaker array system and does Text to Voice to sound off the
alarm, then the user taps into the phone system and transmits the recording to
the phone system, then the user goes into another system to send the alert to
PC and finally to the last system to send out the notice through SMS. In the
end, the process took much longer than expected and the user is not happy and
the distributed message may not be relevant anymore.
A derived requirement in this scenario could
be:
Requirement 3: The system will provide a
standard interface for transmission of messages from Requirement 1 through
channels in Requirement 2.
In this scenario the user would receive the
message, go through some checkbox list of systems that the message needs to go
out of, click a button and voila!
Business users will not be able to
proactively see the solution in the skeptical light that engineers can. As such,
an experienced project team should develop additional requirements to improve end-user
experience and usability. Naturally, these “good ideas” need to be vetted
through the customer prior to being included in the design requirements.
There is much more to properly gathering and
documenting requirements. However, I keep running into this scenario and as
such wanted to address it.
No comments:
Post a Comment