Managing requirements for business value

Abstract

Managing requirements for business value? What's there to manage? Aren't they just...there?" Such perplexity was perfectly understandable in the good old days, when all you had to do was get the requirements from your customer, design your system, and produce one of those awful conformance matrices that demonstrated that you had implemented each and every one of the requirements in your system. Against this dreary backdrop of conformance matrices and the like, it is indeed hard to imagine a role for requirements in the development and execution of business strategy. But, as the song says, the times, they are a changin'. We are now looking outside the traditional boundaries and developing ways of getting maximum business value from our investment in requirements. This paper discusses three ways of realizing this value: managed requirements process, requirements agility, and contractual innovation.