I think this is something you see a lot of in projects. I searched through recent responses and could not find a scenario exactly like ours so I hope you can help us, and anyone like us.
Ten months ago, we embarked on a major systems replacement at our charity. We achieved Business Case approval for the budget, but target timeframes were short and we were forced to run a very quick requirements exercise to allow us to start the bidding process from potential suppliers.
So, the project set off with the best intentions to document our requirements. I can probably say we encountered pure bad luck in this stage.
As well as the short timeframes issue, we just got a ‘bad’ bunch of volunteers to represent our requirements. Workshops were chaotic. They resembled giant talking-shops about the charity’s problems. Despite thorough briefings about the project scope, you would have thought we were planning Amazon’s next website based on some of the impractical and wildly expensive requests we heard.
In hindsight, we should have approached the process of gathering requirements entirely differently, with specialist help for business process mapping, and a focus on what each business areas really needs, instead of what they would like. This was suggested but did not lead to additional spending on that resource.
So not only did we know at the time that we had a messy list of requirements, but we also had a suspicion it may not be complete either.
Fast forward to now. We are in the User Acceptance Testing stage and in every week’s testing session, we have some of the same individuals spending their time chaotically testing the system and raising many new requests on a daily basis for software they now say is critical for the launch.
Of course, we assess everything and have manage to push back on certain items yet there is a huge gap in our system around business rules that we must now fill. Plus some of our testers are already saying the system won’t meet their needs without the things they didn’t mention when they were asked months ago.
Our supplier is helpful and we are working in an Agile way, so have adapted to take up some new requirements. But the supplier has requested a Board meeting and it looks like we are heading towards a project extension and budget increase.
I can accept that. My major advice request is how we can stop the rot? How do we know we will have enough cover to complete the project launch without having to re-run ‘discovery’ (and possibly even requirements gathering) with our users?
It would be great to get your perspective, Savi.
Wishes He Had a Time Machine