Developing the stakeholder requirements definition process — A journey of customization

Abstract

Although high oil prices have attributed bad habits in a matter of “doing things right” rather than “doing the right things” in subsea productions, a continuous price drop renewed the need for cost cutting in recent years. This has been the case for subsea companies, where previous research found significant cost and schedule overruns due to late design changes. A large amount of these late design changes has been a result of poor understanding of stakeholder needs in the early phase of the requirement engineering. To address this issue, we firstly investigated the case subsea company's current practices and found no formal governing process for capturing stakeholder needs and defining them as requirements. We then adopted the systems engineering theory from requirement engineering, agile engineering and associated ISO 15288 and ISO 29148 standards to customize a stakeholder requirement definition process within the company context. In consideration of the company's existing best practices, we further illustrated the customization in a complex system development using advanced subsea product development as an example.